Housekeeping Twaddle:
Boxic
16 December 2014

The point of the photograph here is not the Headpiece of Ra effect bouncing off the building called The Georgica (indeed), but the demolition of the “hog house,” the subway workers’ administrative center. The second storey is long gone, and so is about a third of the ground floor. It is almost unspeakably gratifying to watch the disappearance of these artifacts that, while temporary, have been around for a long time. The return to normal is delicious.

What am I saying? I’m not even living in the same apartment. But it is becoming difficult to remember life in the old place. Who’d want to? It’s so much nicer downstairs! The closets may seem to be about half as spacious as the ones upstairs, and the bedroom and book room might be smaller than their upstairs counterparts (the book room smaller by half, it feels). But the pluses, the advantages, the improvements all smother my recollection of what we’ve lost. I don’t give the fabled view a thought; I may have to take up writing novels just to do something with the speculations that sprout in my head every time I look out the window. And don’t get me started on the Rear Window views from the bedroom and book room. Kathleen doesn’t care for them much, but I’m every bit the fan that I expected to be. Who wants to look at Queens?

(Another improvement: I treasure the Venetian blinds. For one thing, they conceal the hideous blackness of the window frames in the back rooms.)

Before the end of the year, we shall have at least placed an order for sheer, “glass” curtains for the front of the house, and we have chosen the fabric for the sham draperies that will hang, permanently open and purely for visual effect, at the wide window in the living room and the narrower ones in the dining ell. With these in place, we shall have absolutely moved.)

The Great Wall of Book Boxes disappeared much sooner than I expected it to. On Saturday, I opened ten boxes, bringing the remaining total down to seventeen. I don’t know what got into me. Perhaps it was a way of dealing with the suspense of waiting for Kathleen to come home from her second week Out West: I was beginning to wonder if she’d ever see what I’d done (with a lot of help from Ray Soleil) while she was away. In the event, she was somewhat underwhelmed. At least a dozen pictures had gone up on the walls, but she seemed to think that there were already plenty. And the Wall was still standing on Saturday night. It had moved somewhat, but only enough to make the dining ell look quite poorly arranged. Ray and I took care of that on Sunday morning. The wall was dispersed into three separate piles, two of six each, flanking the sideboard, which drifted 90 degrees to make a lot more room for the dining table, and a line-up of the remaining three on the dining ell side of the bench in the living room. Atop each the latter is an open box of pictures: regular, wide, and probationary. In most cases, “probationary” means that I no longer care enough for a picture to override Kathleen’s dislike of it.

There is shelf space in the book room for the contents of two, and perhaps almost three, of the remaining boxes of books. Two boxes will certainly go to the uptown storage unit. I may construct additional shelving in the dining ell. (Something like this.) I will stock it with sets of paperbacks — Penguins, Oxford World Classics, nyrbs, Eulenburg miniature scores, maybe even the Loebs. For all my adult sophistication, there is nothing that pleases me quite as much as a row of matching paperback spines.

Moving the sideboard changed everything. The entire public side of the apartment snapped into focus. I am dying to give a party. Valentine’s Day?

In further twaddle, I learned last night that I’ve lost five weeks of Quicken transactions. Why? Even JM can’t say. Somehow, the backup file was corrupted when the attempt to open the default file, itself corrupted, was terminated. New protocols will afford stiffer protection. I’ll save all the receipts until I’m sure that they have been backed up recoverably. (No more overwriting of files; I’ll have to delete backups periodically.) I’ll be able to re-enter December’s bills without too much fuss, as I print a report of them each month. But nothing like this has ever happened before in the more than fifteen years that I’ve been using Quicken. Coupled with the gremlins that made Kathleen’s edits of a hundred-page document inaccessible to her (the IT people at the firm recovered most of them), the Quicken glitch is spooky.

And, just to make things really ticklish, this week’s New Yorker arrived on Monday, as it ought to do but hardly ever does.

***

Over the weekend, Mark Bittman stepped forward from his accustomed food platform to publish an Op-Ed piece of global perspective, in which he argued that all the problems of today’s society are related, and that demonstrating against “the billionaire class” ought to be kept up until the “superrich” are appropriately taxed. The piece was flavored with more than a dollop of pungent late-Sixties extract, which is doubtless why I found myself protesting against almost every sentence, even though I am in complete accord with Bittman’s basics. I hate it when the prospect of Justice is made to smell like someone who needs a bath.

The only thing that could make American society worse than it already is would be a return to Sixties-style antagonism — which has already demonstrated its miserable track record. Bittman seems absolutely unaware that today’s dystopic tendencies have been willed into being by his rough contemporaries of the same sex, men who were boys back then, and who grew up with no intention whatsoever of raising their consciousness. These men, I expect, will die off without heirs of their own; their sons will not be so determined to avenge their fathers’ loss of hegemony. But it’s so much easier to blame things on undertaxed plutocrats, a vaguely insect, non-human class that crawls out from under the rocks when nobody is looking.

These “billionaires” are as fictional as the intellectuals’ “masses.” Sure, there are too many people out there in possession of nine-figure fortunes, but they don’t form a class except to the extent that they support legislation (or the lack of it) that will allow them to keep all their money. This money, it seems to me, has poured upon them from ever more capacious chutes, as changes in social patterns (such as the use of “devices” that didn’t exist twenty-five years ago) have caused the payment of certain kinds of rents to skyrocket. Punitive taxation isn’t the answer; income diversion, breaking up some of the grosser revenue streams, is a far more intelligent response.

I am also unhappy with the plan of encouraging young people to try to fix things, equipped with nothing but stamina and enthusiasm. I don’t understand how anyone even passingly acquainted with the Cultural Revolution in China can embrace such a program without shudders and nausea.

After all, it was the radical elements of Sixties counterculture who turned out the lights on the New Deal, dismissing it as not nearly good enough. It was the abandonment of the Postwar consensus by progressives that opened the way for right-wing predators.

***

It’s Beethoven’s birthday. (He’d be 244.) That means it’s okay to start playing Christmas carols. If you’ve waited until now, you won’t be sick of them until the last few days of the year.