last Week at Portico: Only three new pages this week. I was hard at work on a fourth when Ms NOLA and J— breezed by. Sitting on the balcony with them, enjoying the olives and the baguette that they brought, the Chablis and the cheese that I found in the fridge, and the berceuse of a blue evening was vastly more amusing than writing, so I ditched my responsibilities. No guilt was felt. It’s the end of July, the beginning of August (is that a movie title?), and while I won’t say that I deserve a break, I’ll admit to enjoying the hell out of one.

Last Friday’s movie was Humpday; despite its Jude Apatow title, it’s a serious and sophisticated comedy, written in a key with lots of sharps. In The New Yorker, Kirsten Valdez Quade’s story, “The Five Wounds,” marked a very impressive début. Et enfin, the Book Review review.

last Week at Portico: Last weekend’s Book Review was one of the worst issues I’ve ever worked my way through, and it was bad in many different ways, as you’ll find if you have a look at my review of the Review. My displeasure was enhanced by the unhelpful placement, two years ago, of a review of Peter Cameron’s Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You among the Children’s Books, which may have accorded with somebody’s marketing plans but which made then and makes no no literary sense. Writing about William Styron’s “Rat Beach,” this week’s New Yorker story, I assumed that it had not been published before; forgive me if I’m wrong. Finally, last week’s Friday movie was Woody Allen’s Whatever Works.

last Week at Portico: Even though five Daily Office entries appeared this week — more about why in a moment — I managed to write le minimum: pages on last Friday’s movie, Public Enemies, on this week’s novel, Cheerful Weather for the Wedding (more of a novella, really), and of course the Book Review review.

Over the holiday weekend, I decided, rather quickly, to replace the Monday edition of the Daily Office with a Friday edition. This will allow me to enjoy the weekend more freely, or at least to have more time for reading. Some sort of brief news post will appear on Monday, but the nature of its contents may take the rest of the summer to settle.

last Week at Portico: It was beneath us, of course, but we went to see Todd Phillips’s The Hangover  last week. We went alone, thinking it unwise to tell anyone that we were going, much less to ask anyone to join us. We told ourselves that the movie would be surprisingly different in unexpected ways, but at least we don’t have to take back saying that to anybody else. We also read Geoff Dyer’s Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi , and decided that it’s a first-rate piece of conceptual art. Fun to read, too. Rather more engaging, or at least more geared to our possibly vétuste sensibilities, was this week’s New Yorker story, Lorrie Moore’s “Childcare.”

As for this week’s Book Review, the one truly good review in the entire issue was written by Liesl Schillinger, who is a critic. I’m not saying that Ms Schillinger ought never to write a novel, as long as she learns who to write one better than any of the novelists appearing this week knows how to play critic. Caleb Crain, who clearly speaks for all of those young gents (as I’ve no doubt most of them are) who strongly dislike the work and whimsy of Alain de Botton, ought to have the courage of his animus, and express himself plainly instead of resorting to  condescending snark. Ha! Now there’s no need for you to click throught to this week’s Book Review review.

 last Week at Portico: ¶ I loved it so much the first time, I took Kathleen to see it the very next day: in my humble opinion, Anne Fletcher’s The Proposal is the best film (so far) of 2009. I wish it had come out in January, because then I should have made the same statement, idiotic though it be to claim a best picture in the first month of the year, simply in honor of Pauline Kael’s 1978 choice of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. In my humble opinion, Pauline Kael was visually tone-deaf, too political a mentality to discuss any branch of art. The damage wrought by her influence will take at least another ten years to purge. ¶ What did you make of Stephen O’Connor’s short story in this week’s New Yorker, “Ziggurat“? I got so little out of it that I probably ought to have remained silent; but I will say that I did not dislike it. ¶ Kate Christensen’s Trouble, her fifth novel, is definitely a book for the second read (just as The Proposal, like all of Hitchcock, is meant for the second viewing), which makes it difficult to talk about — it seems so much simpler than it is, and yet the anatomy of its artful composition would be worse than useless to first-time readers. So let me just give it a rave. ¶ My friend Vestal McIntyre’s Lake Overturn gets the best (highest-quality) review in this week’s Book Review, but, wouldn’t you know, it appears in one of those infernal roundups.

last Week at Portico: The subjects of this week’s four pages are: Accent on Youth, an MTC revival starring the inimitable David Hyde Pierce; “Idols,” Tim Gautreaux’s story in the current issue of The New Yorker; Tony Scott’s updating of The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3; and, of course, the Book Review.

last Week at Portico: ¶ Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn gives us a character, Eilis Lacey, capable of replacing the hysterical women in Dostoevsky with a deadly quiet. ¶ Carlos Cuarón’s Rudo y Cursi re-unites the stars of his very popular Y Tu Mamá También, Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna, but it doesn’t seem to have been taken up by that film’s audience. I found the new picture tighter and more memorable; perhaps what I mean by that is that the story of Rudo y Cursi is itself somewhat more grown up. ¶ And, 0f course, the Book Review review (“Telling the Tale”).

Last Week at Portico: A few weeks ago, I began writing up my responses to the weekly short stories in The New Yorker, and publishing them at here. It didn’t take long for me to recognize that the pieces belong at Portico, but I couldn’t find the time to alter the one or two menus and to create the navigation page that would be indispensable to getting from here to there.  Meanwhile, I let a couple of stories go by without writing them up. If nothing else, working this vein of guilt kept complacency at bay.

On Wednesday, I think it was, I took The New Yorker to lunch and sat in the restaurant until I was finished with Jonathan Franzen’s “Good Neighbors”. (I laughed out loud quite often, but they’re used to that, where I have lunch on Wednesdays). I couldn’t wait to get home and start writing.

Until, that is, I started writing, yesterday morning. The story struck me as so rich and satisfying and classic that I was covered in inadequacy. The first draft was spastic. I took the the now-unusual step of printing it out and marking it up with a pencil. Then I revised it at the computer. This morning, I revised it again. If short fiction in The New Yorker regularly cost this much time and effort, I’d have to abandon the feature.  

Also difficult to write about was Kazuo Ishiguro’s new collection of short stories (written at one go), Nocturnes. The surface of each story eddies uncertainly, like the East River between tides, and seems to conceal a secret or a puzzle. After much nail biting, I concluded that the secret is that the stories are as would-be glamorous as the characters in them. Which is not much of a secret; but then would-be glamour doesn’t amount to much, either. As stories (not puzzles), the tales in Nocturnes are hard to put down.

Up, in contrast, was extremely easy to write up. The new Pixar movie made a direct and unambiguous connection with me. I wish that I had had grandchildren sitting next to me. 

And finally, this week’s Book Review review.

Last Week at Portico: Something of a Noël Coward entry, this, as you will see. ¶ Our Memorial Day weekend was bracketed by two evenings on Broadway, in theatres right round the corner from one another. Blithe Spirit was a must-see, because of its cast, which included Angela Lansbury, Rupert Everett, Deborah Rush, and an actress whom I’ve been trying to see for years, Jayne Atkinson (Christine Ebersole is great, too). God of Carnage was also a must-see because of its cast, but the playwright’s name was certainly a draw. The cast was made up of Jeff Daniels, Hope Davis, James Gandolfini, and Marcia Gay Harden. The accidental Tony Soprano jokes were a squirt of lemon juice on a great dish. Has there ever been anything like the profusion of great actors on Broadway?

¶ This week’s movie is Easy Virtue, an interesting and not heavyhanded adaptation of a play that Coward wrote in his twenties. In the Twenties. You have to see it, because Kristin Scott Thomas just about sings. ¶ And, of course, the Book Review review.

The lordly Hudson, photographed by Jean Ruaud, 19 May 2009.

Last Week at Portico: In spite of spending a great part of the week out and about with Jean Ruaud, I got a great deal done. Well, I took care of le minimum: the Book Review review, natch; Ramin Bahrani’s Goodbye Solo; and, most important of all, a page — a preliminary page — on Vestal McIntyre’s magnificent first novel, Lake Overturn. 

On the dust jacket, Kate Christensen compares the novel to Middlemarch, and she is not wrong to do so. Lake Overturn is also a book written, as Virginia Woolf put it, for grown-up people. But its twelve year-old ensemble lead, Enrique Cortez, may be the first gay boy in literature to give Tom Sawyer a run.

Last Week at Portico: This week was crazy. I never even found the time to write up a Morning Read — that’s a first (and, I hope, a last). I still owe a few words on Salman Rushdie’s New Yorker story. And that’s just for here! For Portico, I managed to put up a few words on the gruesomely funny Julia, starring Tilda Swinton, cram recollections of three completely different musical events (Denk/Perlman/Graham) onto one page, and — I can’t really believe it — the Book Review review.

Last Week at Portico: ¶ After months and months and months of not getting it right, I finally forced a final draft of Brian Morton’s The Dylanist to materialize. This makes Mr Morton the first author whose novelistic oeuvre I have written up in toto. All four are lovely books, not infused but positively tanned in a vision of New York as a place where no one ever really dies. ¶ If you know what Jim Jarmusch was up to in No Limits, No Control (a movie billed, at least on gigantic placards at the Angelika, as The Limits of Control), you know how to reach me. Not that I care, particularly; the movie’s really too beautiful for everyday “meaning.” ¶ Touré’s essay on post-blackness may not constitute the best book review imaginable (of Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor), but it’s a must read. When you’re done, check out the Book Review review.