¶ An interesting detail in today’s tale from the Decameron (IV, vi): The podestà, having wrestled in vain with the heroine’s chastity, has to explain the situation to the girls father.

The chief magistrate, thinking it preferable to make a clean breast of his attempt on the girl rather than to wait for her to denounce him, began by praising her for her constancy, in proof of which he went on to describe how he had behaved towards her. On discovering how resolute she was, he had fallen deeply in love with her.

Some “clean breast.” The original does not use such a figure of speech, but is more naked about tactics; I’d render it thus: “The podestà, preferring to accuse himself than to being accused by her…” This curious story, like IV, ii, seems to run two tales together: first, that of the woman who must honorably dispose of the body of her secret husband after his death from natural causes, and that of a powerful man who claims to have fallen in love with a woman whom he was unable to rape.

¶ In the Aeneid, the Sybil leads Aeneas into the underworld. It is impossible not to think of Dante, who enlarges considerably on most of Virgil’s lines. Interestingly, Dante crowds the hither bank of the Acheron not with Virgil’s unburied (as, Palinurus) but with people who never made up their minds about belief.

Heaven case them forth — their presence there would dim
   The light; deep Hell rejects so base a herd,
   Lest sin should boast itself because of them.
                                         (Inferno, III, 40-42; translation by Dorothy L Sayers)

¶ C K Williams: These New Poems are vastly more accessible than the ones in A Dream of Mind. In “The Blade,” a poem dated to the 2004 presidential election, the poet compares the US to Franco’s Spain, in the grip of “fearmongering, slander and lies.” I’m sorry that I didn’t know the poem at the time.

¶ Today’s Blogging Hero: Ken Fisher, of Ars Technica. “Ars Technica has developed a huge following by focusing not just on technical topics, but on the full range of human arts and sciences.” A cursory glance at the site suggests this may be the most preposterous statement in Michael Banks’s book. Ken Fisher comes off, though, as somewhat more serious (in the French sense) than any of the previous heroes.

¶ Now that I have The Red and the Black on hand, I see that I was doing fine with the original: the translation doesn’t really clear up any of the little mysteries that I attributed to faulty comprehension. My ancient Livre de poche edition, I find, even prints a paragraph of today’s chapter (XXV, “The Seminary”) out of place, where it makes no sense.

¶ Writing about Marcel Reich-Ranicki — a German critic whose name one sees more and more — Clive James introduces me to a new and delightful word: Mumpitz, “that useful German word for exalted twaddle.” Of which there is apparently none in the writings, easily read in German according to James, of this issuer of death-certificates (to “dead” works of art).

¶ No more Mitfords for the time being, now that I’ve done with the latest collection of letters. Something tells me that I won’t be able to stay away from Jessica’s letters for long, though. Of all the sisters, she seems to have had the keenest sense of linguistic absurdity, than which there is no greater teacher.

Angel Franco for the Times

You’ll have to trust me on this, but I have long maintained that, in an era of cheap and fast communications, rivers leave much to be desired as political boundaries. Deserts and mountain wastes make much better frontiers, because distance trumps even the best-maintained stone walls when it comes to good neighborliness. Now, fresh evidence of my thesis comes straight from Ohio. Or is it Kentucky?

With any luck, the major Democratic Party candidates will take opposing positions on the future of the so-called Portsmouth Rock, thus introducing a healthy if novel note of substantive debate into the ongoing campaign.

Throwing a baby shower for women only is currently unconstitutional in Manhattan. So, when the parents and in-laws of a former associate of Kathleen’s gave the couple a baby shower, at a multicameral West Side eatery, I was expected to show up. This was something of a hardship, because, even in the absence of a rock band, conversation at such an event is almost impossible. Even with men on hand, a baby shower brings out the side of women that Lerner & Loew’s Henry Higgins complains about. (Discretion forbids me to elaborate.)

There was, for example, a game of Bingo. The squares on the cards were filled out with items from the baby shower registry, and players were to check them off as gifts were opened. The trouble was, the men opening the presents weren’t always sure of what they’d just unwrapped, and a few items, such as “baby fingernail clipper,” were not contemplated by the designers of the cards. There was much discussion about whether “baby keys” and “rattle” were identical, until I pointed out that both items appeared on my card. The prize was the centerpiece on each table: a large piggy-bank in the form of a baby bottle, filled with pink jelly beans. When no one seemed to have pencils for the Bingo, I suggested that we use the few remaining jelly beans that, having been scattered in drifts on each table, still remained uneaten. Pencils were produced forthwith.

Kathleen dashed off after her starter bowl of soup. Poof! She was gone. And, with her, any chance of making a graceful early exit. I wasn’t having a bad time, but there were all sorts of things that I wanted to be doing at any home — an excuse that, shared as it was by every man in the room, including, I’ve no doubt, the expectant father, was therefore too lame to venture. I knew most of the people I was seated with, although the most interesting topic — Kathleen’s Shocking True Stories of Mad & Deranged Clients — was obviously off limits. I sat back and ate my lunch like a good boy.

The one thing that I didn’t have to worry about was an event that never ended. From the moment we arrived, it was clear that the party was “running late.” Shortly past four — not bad at all, really — I was out on the street, walking past the Dakota toward the Park.

Three of the many beasties guarding the perimeter of the Dakota. Alas, they didn’t protect John Lennon.

There had been snow during dessert, but the sky was clearing when the shower broke up. Once I was inside the Park, however, it began to snow again, and as I made my way along the sad little service road that runs between the 86th Street transverse and the reservoir, I found myself in a momentary blizzard. It was also very chilly. I had to put my gloved hands in my coat pockets to stop the shooting pains of cold. By the time I reached Fifth Avenue, the show had given up blowing from all four corners of the compass, and the sky was clear again, with sunlight warming the higher reaches of taller buildings. 

To make for a perfect happy ending, the other elevator was working when I got home. But let’s not go into that. 

The copper roof in the middle belongs to Marymount, another Fifth Avenue school attended by Kathleen. She still wound up married to me.

“And then I did it unconsciously.” Fool’s Gold is not without its sublime moments. Unswervingly dopey, it is unafraid to be magical — if you know anything about what Kate Hudson’s character calls the “third thing.” PG-13!

¶ Fool’s Gold.

Thanks to Fossil Darling.

If so, the market’s not to worry.

On Fifth Avenue, literally.

It’s Friday morning, but there’s not a single tempting movie showing in New York City. That I haven’t already seen, that is. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, I’ve been advised, is mushy and sentimental in a way that its true-life subject would have hated. As for 27 Dresses, which is showing, conveniently, right across the street, no one I know has actually seen it. This leaves No Country For Old Men, which I’m not sure I could sit through. Que faire? Meanwhile:

¶ James B Stewart on Stephen A Schwarzman, in The New Yorker.

An old stairway at the Metropolitan Museum of Art — an outcrop of the buried original.

This afternoon, not having been in a while, I walked over to the museum. It was agreeably underpopulated for some reason, although there were still plenty of small knots of people stopping in the middle of the traffic, unaware that New York pedestrians follow rules of the road. If you want to stop and get your bearings, you pull over. Oy.

As I was on my way to see my favorite picture, only to find that it’s out on loan for a while, I reflected that, much as I love to meet people at the museum, I prefer to go through the galleries by myself, because that’s the only way to rule out talking. If it were up to me, the museum would be as silent as a church in a pentitential season. I have overheard a lot of claptrap at the museum, some of it uttered by myself, but never anything worth attending to.

The great name of Andre Meyer has been retired, it seems, and the galleries of Nineteenth-Century European art that used to bear his name have been tweaked, expanded, and partially renamed. The change is a great improvement, if for no other reason than the sensible incorporation of a great deal of American and Twentieth-Century art that belongs alongside the impressionist, pre-, and post- pictures that were already there. For example, Sargent’s Madame X, formerly rather hard to find, tucked away in the American Wing, now commands the best spot in the house, and can be seen for miles, which is just as it should be, since everybody wants to see her. Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein is very much at home a room or two away. I am not entirely sure about the installation of an Art-Nouveau dining room from a house near the Place de l’Étoile; it’s very handsome, but surely it belongs among the exhibits of decorative arts on the ground floor. A quibble.

There’s a nice little show of drawings and etchings in the Johnson Gallery (that corridor that connects the top of the grand staircase with the lobby of the old Andre Meyer galleries), a pendant to the soon-to-open Poussin and Nature. My favorite is a drawing by Donato Creti — no, I hadn’t heard of him, either — “Bathers in a Woodland Landscape.” You’d miss the bathers if it weren’t for the title; they’re lost among the tree trunks in the background. The only clear figure is that of a gentlemanly rustic drying himself off on a rock. The whole scene is shot with the bright peace — and even the fragrance — of a summer afternoon in the woods.

Two other nice works: an etching by Joseph Rebell (d 1826) that, with its pale, distant bluff, roundly prefigures the Hudson River School (which isn’t saying as much as that might sound, since the HRS is mightily retrospective); and an anonymous Seventeenth-Century French drawing of some architectural ruins that strongly suggest the Met in a makeover for one of those apocalyptic movies going round these days. I’d have bought the catalogue, but of course there wasn’t one; there never is for this sort of show, drawn entirely from the Museum’s collection.

As Guy Trebay’s piece in today’s Times points out, these gents ought to be getting their suits in the boys’ department.

Forget skinny models. Forget theories about the appeal of the undernourished silhouette in an age of obesity. Boomers have been dressing like boys since they were boys.

I suppose I’m just lucky that, when I was a boy, coats and ties were required, pretty much all the way through.

¶ The Decameron, IV, v: The story of Isabella and her pot of basil. Well, that’s how Keats told it, inspired by Boccaccio. Boccaccio’s doomed heroine is called Lisabetta. There’s a picture at the MFA in Boston that was here for a show a few years ago, by John White Alexander, painter of the Met’s great Repose. My, what a big pot, you think — if you don’t know the story, which is that, long-story-short, Lisabetta put the head of her murdered lover, Lorenzo, in a pot, which she planted with basil that she watered with her tears. (The former gardener in me bristles: too much salt!).

So of course I had to read the Keats, which comes in sixty-three strophes. Two super lines for the tongue, the first a cool dismissal of mercantile wealth, the second a wild cry of grief.

Enriched from ancestral merchandize,

and

Moan hither, all ye syllables of woe,

And one very arresting strophe.

Who hat not loiter’d in a green church-yeard,
  And let his spirit, like a demon-mole,
Work through the clayey soil and gravel hard,
  To see scull, coffin’d bones, and funeral stole;
Pitying each form that hungry death hath marr’d
  And filling it once more with human soul?
Ah! this is holiday to what was felt
When Isabella by Lorenzo knelt.

¶ That’s enough verse for today, so we skip the Aeneid and C K Williams. Clive James writes a note — no more — about Edgar Quinet (1803-1875), a public intellectual who may have been the first to ask whether the excesses of the French Revolution were “worth it” — still a question the asking of which can land you in hot water with the Left, which, frankly, Clive James has had enough of. Insofar as Leftists rely on theories, I quite agree. There is really no need for theories when confronted with injustices all round. It seems to me that the Right is pretty dependent on theories, too, most notably tiresome myths about private property (which is protected by law in order to avoid violence, not to guarantee claims) and “personal responsibility.”

¶ Today’s Blogging Hero: John Neff of Autoblog. It’s curious, but a blog about cars seems about as go-ahead as a blog about powdered wigs. Curious geographical slips: “We meet about every three months, either in New York City at AOL headquarters in Rockefeller Square, or in Dulles, Virginia, where the main office is.” Have they changed “Vienna” to “Dulles”? They certainly haven’t built Rockefeller Square yet, not in New York anyway. Plaza and Center, yes, but no Square.

¶ “Go-ahead” is a term used by Diana Mosley in a letter about one of her father’s ill-advised investments: “In those days wirelesses and plastic were both rather go-ahead.” The scheme in question envisioned “making millions” by encasing radios in plastic simulacra of fine old Chinese porcelains. Oh, dear; sounds straight out of Wodehouse.

Diana to Deborah, March 1998:

I’m not nearly as clever as you are & I terribly regret your one blind spot, you would LOVE not just Proust, but Flaubert, Henry James, George Eliot, Goethe’s novels, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov, all these brilliant treasures & many more. I think possibly it comes from impatience, you want to be up & doing, well you are & think of the wonderful achievements! You have got the patience to plant trees, hedges,you know they take ages but once they’re in they grow & you can be doing again, something else. You don’t want to sit ruminating over a book, you want quick action. I do regret it, can’t help it, thinking how you would laugh at Proust’s jokes or be terrified by Conrad’s descrip of the slow fire in a cargo of coal ready to turn & drown them all if the wind changes. It’s true my world is peopled by characters in books, & it’s a mystery how you, so interested in human nature, can do without it seen through eyes of genius. But perhaps it’s clever nature at work which gave you a task far more important than just loving to read. Your fund of wonderful human sympathy is much more unselfish, in face reading is selfish & would probably waste your time which you spend making life bearable for one & all. So in the end I applaud your choice. It is much clever to do than just to think.

Deborah’s reply (excerpt):

Oh, Proust, shall I try it now or is it too late? I do hope it’s too late.

If I were to start up a school today, I’d have the sixth-graders spending their mornings doing morning reads just like mine — so many pages of this, so many lines of that, with brief commentary — and their afternoons memorizing poetry. Seventh-graders, in lieu of sex ed, would study Robert Graves’s The Greek Myths, with the teachers required to Explain Everything.

Portrait of the author in despair, wondering what he will tell his wife about having watched further episodes of Lewis.

Over the weekend, George Snyder (1904) sent me the link to a video clip from Baisers Volés, François Truffaut’s 1968 continuation of the autobiography of Antoine Doinel. It’s a film that I hadn’t seen (oy). In the clip, Antoine (Jean-Pierre Léaud) opens a letter, concerning the difference between politeness and tact, left at his doorstep, and we hear the voice of his boss’s wife (Delphine Seyrig) read it. After hazarding a reply (cunningly shown being posted via pneumatique), Antoine gets into bed (shown). Seyrig was a gorgeous blonde with a well-deployed whisper of a voice, and George was quite right to be bowled over by it.

So I rented the movie. Stolen Kisses to you, bub. I rented it on Sunday, after dinner at an ordinarily-packed restaurant denuded by the Super Bowl. 

Which meant that I had to watch it yesterday afternoon or pay extra. This is always happening with rented foreign films. I can never interest Kathleen in watching them because, at least at home, she doesn’t want to read subtitles. (Given the amount of time that she spends poring over legal boilerplate, I don’t blame her.) The days go by — and I find myself watching a movie when I’d rather be writing. “Roger, pay the two dollars.” But I can’t. I’ve got to watch the damned movie and get it back to the Video Room.

All of which is meant to console George for not finding Baisers Volés at Netflix. Life is rough even when the rental place is two doors down, and you just walk in and ask, and okay okay.

That ought to have been enough video for one day. But Kathleen was working late, so I ordered in. I might have read while I ate. But I wanted to watch something. There were lots of things to watch, including the newly-acquired video of A Dance to the Music of Time. But no.

You see, I’d been on a Morse jag, watching one Inspector Morse episode after another.

Isn’t it a pity, I said the other night, that they only made a pilot of Lewis — a continuation of Morse, sort of, in which it was now the North Country former-sergeant Lewis who had a Morse-like gent working for him. Isn’t it a pity, I said.

Yes! affirmed Kathleen. I like Lewis!

But we were wrong about their not proceeding beyond the pilot, and the box from Amazuke arrived today. Could I wait? More anon.

I love my Coolpix. The pictures that it takes without a flash are astonishing. The view from our balcony, this seventh morning of February.

The most beautiful American woman, ever.

What am I reading? I seem to have passed into an alternative universe in which the question no longer means anything. I am reading from seven books most weekday mornings; on the weekends, lately, I’ve been finishing off novels. Am I ready to blame this blog for the fact that I read much less than I used to do? What I ought to blame is the Nano. I was up until two-thirty in the morning loading up a new device, in a vain attempt to get things just right. It is some sort of revenge for all my offhand dismissals of modish personal music systems, which I had “outgrown.” Ha. When I told my friend Nom de Plume how childish I was the other night (or early morning), she riposted, “I don’t know about ‘childish,’ but it seems very masculine to me.” A guy and his Nano — ouch!

Meanwhile, I’m listening to Michael Palin’s audiobook of his Diaries 1969-1979: The Python Years, and learning all sorts of things while being hugely entertained on my daily walks. Names, for one thing: “Cleese” rhymes with “please,” not “geese,” and it’s “Palin” with a long “a.”  Every time I mention the audiobook to Kathleen, she says, “He’s the one I don’t like,” but this in fact always turns out to be Eric Idle, and of course it was Mr Idle’s characters whom Kathleen didn’t like.

I don’t know which Monty Python routine is my favorite, but the one that Kathleen and I quote most often is, by far, Ann Elk’s theory about the brontosaurus. “And that it is, too, Chris.”

¶ The Decameron, IV, iv: Love via hearsay, the story of Gerbino and the Tunisian princess, who fell in love by report, as it were, never seeing one another until the moment of death (as it turned out). Being slow, it was not until today that I reflected on the trouble that handsome young men must have gotten into by reading these tales aloud in mixed company. Just imagine the reaction of a cloistered fourteen year-old girl to Gerbino’s address to his pirate crew!

It is my conviction that no mortal being who is without experience of love can ever lay claim to true excellence. And if you are in love, or have ever been in love, it will not be difficult for you to understand what it is that I desire. For I am in love, gentlemen…

¶ In the Aeneid, the Cumaean sybil tells Aeneas to fetch the golden bough if he wants to visit the Underworld on a return ticket. This quest is rather overshadowed by the big funeral for Misenus, Aeneas’s trumpeter, who got in an ill-advised pissing match — blowing, actually — with Triton. The Oxford Classical Dictionary (2003) rather useless on Misenus. Someone among Virgil’s patrons must have had a place at Misenum, the Neapolitan suburb named after the herald.

¶ C K Williams’s New Poems: shorter lines, for one thing. A reference to Iraq, in “Blackbird.”

I’d been thinking of Lincoln’s
“…You can’t fool all of the people
all of the time…,” how I once
took comfort from the hope and trust
it implied, but no longer.

Patience, my dear poet; patience.

¶ Clive James on Proust: Just a page or two, but James’s point is that Proust, “the greatest French writer,” infuses all of Cultural Amnesia.

This book you are reading now could easily have been ten times as long if it had contained nothing else but expansions on the notes I have made from reading Proust in several editions over the course of forty years.

¶ Today’s Blogging Hero: Peter Rojas, of Engadget. This book has no place in such august company, but I don’t think that I could get through it otherwise. On the Simple Life:

When I decide I want to learn something about a field or an area, I just subscribe to blogs in that area, sometimes at random. For example, about a year ago I decided to learn about widgets. I literally Googled “widgets blog” and found a bunch of blogs. As I read and linked to more blogs, it became obvious what the best blogs in that field were.

I added those to my RSS feed, and deleted some of the other ones that weren’t so good. And that gave me a pretty good sense of what was going on in the widget blogosphere.

It’s a really good way to familiarize yourself with a field. Just start reading the blogs. You won’t need to really spend a lot of time sweating over what is the best, because it will become apparent in a few weeks.

Well, what are you waiting for?

¶ Jessica to Deborah, March 1995:

Enclosed: a killing article by Xopher Hitchens in Vanity Fair, at least I loved it. Did you catch the telly programme about Mother Teresa? I always thought she was just a boring old saint, hadn’t realized she’s a disgusting old fascist.

Deborah to Diana, July 1996:

Reading the obits. of Decca, the Mitford Girls are described variously, as Famous Notorious Talented Glamorous Turbulent Unpredictable Celebrated Infamous Rebellious Colourful & Idiosyncratic. So, take your choice. The D Express has a long article about us called ‘Sex and Power.” I suppose anyone who is married, & most who aren’t, have what is now called Had Sex* at some point in their lives. As for Power I don’t quite see how that comes into it. So why are we different from anyone else.

                                                            Much love, Debo

* Look at the people walking down Oxford St, all products of Having Sex.

As The Mitfords draws to a close, far from wondering what made the sisters different, I’m convinced that Zeus or someone equally Parnassian was involved in their parentage.

Kathleen has been feeling a bit run down in these groundhog days, and her back gave out on Friday. So, when I began to dress for Saturday night’s concert at Carnegie Hall, and I gave her recumbency a pat and told her that she could stay home if she liked, I expected my reprieve to be met with a moan or two of gratitude.. Ordinarily, I am not so easygoing about ducking out of concert-going. Instead of which, the next thing I knew, Kathleen was up and dressed herself. Much as she wanted to stay in bed (a very, very great deal), she had no intention of missing Orpheus’ performance of one of her favorite works. (That would be Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings.) For once, I didn’t have to remind Kathleen that she always likes, and not infrequently loves, Orpheus at Carnegie.

¶ Mozart and Tchaikovsky, with violinist Nikolaj Znaider.

Snow, finally. Living in the city, with no need for a car, I never look at weather reports, so I have no idea how much snow is expected — and don’t you go telling me! When I want to know if it’s raining, I glance at the cupola of St Joseph’s (shown above) to check for streaks of wet. As Akira Kurosawa observed, you can’t see real rain.

How about those Mets? Oh! right! It’s all good! My son-in-law-elect is a a big Giants fan, so I’m taking the victory as personally auspicious.

¶ There is an opera in there somewhere… The Decameron, IV, iii: the three sisters, their three lovers, and a miscellany of vengeance suggesting that it is early days, indeed, on the narrative front. Although one of the three sisters is tied up in a sack, the dramatic possibilities so adroitly exploited in the plot of Rigoletto remain entirely unexplored.

¶ The Aeneid, beginning of Book 5: The Cumaean sibyl’s cave. What I’m looking for — and may find tomorrow — is the prophecy explains what the Sybil is doing up on the Sistine ceiling.

¶ CK Williams: “Helen”:

His own body had long ago become a ruin, but beauty had never been a part of what he was.
What would happen to his lust, and to his love, when time came to savage and despoil her?

A Dream of Mind climaxes in a poem about the death of a lover that, without any explicit allusions, seems shot with classical mythology, most notably to the story of Orpheus and Euridice. My critic faculties busily protect me from this obviously powerful poem.

¶ Clive James, nominally on the subject of Jean Prévost, but really out to dish Sartre:

Unlike his fellow resistance hero Sartre, Prévost had been confident enough to follow his star in the direction of the German soldiers, but Sartre left that out. There was a lot, after the war, that everyone wanted to leave out. The spontaneous universalism that Prévost had so admirably represented in the Thirties was irrevocably passé. The division of labor once again became the rule in clerical work. What a man like Prévost had once integrated into a single joyous effort was now broken up into separate specialties, each with its resident panels of shamans and charlatans. The once very real prospect of a widely curious humanism had decayed and separated into literary theory, bogus philosophy and ideological special pleading on behalf of political systems which had, as their first enemy, the irreducible complexity of a living culture.

¶ Today’s Blogging Hero: Robert Scoble, of the tech site Scobleizer. And today’s insight: “So thinking about the blog is part of the blogging process?” “Yeah.” I looked for this gem in vain among the Power Points. It appears that Mr Scoble is at Davos as we speak (or maybe not). I wonder if I’ll ever be invited to the humanist equivalent of Davos. Will there be an equivalent? Online, at best — humanism is very, very ill-paid.

¶ Le rouge et le noir: Sorel arrives in Besançon, and visits his first café — where he almost gets into a fight, little would-be Napoleon that he is. How understandably reluctant he is to toddle off to the seminary! If there were ever a young man without a “vocation,” it’s Julien Sorel.

¶ Over the weekend, I finished another section of The Mitfords, and now have only the last to read. We’re down to Diana, Decca, and Debo. It’s getting gowlish!

Today’s book was in my pile for about nine months before I realized that I was never going to sit down and read a book about the Lost Boys of Sudan. I was simply never going to begin. So I bought the unabridged BBC audiobook and listened to the seventeen CDs on my daily walks for much of the fall of 2007. What Is the What turned out to be almost as upsettingly unpleasant as I feared it would be, but not quite, and at times it was unexpectedly bright. If Valentino Achak Deng is not the decent man that he appears to be here, I’m afraid that I don’t want to know it.

Without judging Dion Graham’s performance in any detail, I can say that his talents always seem to be quite easily broad enough to encompass the wide range of speaking characters who figure in the book. More than that, though, he reads the story as if he had told it a thousand times already, never the same way twice.

¶ What Is the What.

My infidelities continue astound me; I have fallen so far that I can no longer bear the hollowness of my own resolutions. On Wednesday afternoon, I was seduced by a book lying on a table at Crawford Doyle: Brian Morton’s Starting Out in the Evening. A friend had mentioned seeing the recent film adaptation, which, I was bemused to note, had required nearly ten years of gestation since the novel’s publication. And even then, what fudging: the overweight and blobular Schiller, a seventy-one year-old survivor of the New York Intellectual galaxy, is played by the very dashing Frank Langella. Vincent Gardenia would have been more like it. Now that I want to see it, I’m stuck in the limbo between theatrical and DVD release.

Although the jacket blurb calls the novel “comic,” none of the many testimonials printed at the beginning of the paperback mention how funny the book is. That’s perhaps because I’m the only reader who thinks so. Once I’d calmed down enough to read a passage that had had me coughing with laughter, Kathleen pronounced “clever” and “sweet,” but not “funny.” I was reminded that nobody else finds Verdi’s ballet music side-splitting, either.

I’ll come back to the humor later. For now, the following grave and beautiful passage from very near the end. It concerns Casey, the middle-aged, half-black, half-Jewish professor — this is a very New York novel — whose relationship with Schiller’s daughter, ended years ago because she wanted children but he didn’t, has been rekindled.

The last few months had beden very different from what he’d expected. He was finally ready to begin a project that he’d been thinking about for years, and he’d been hoping for a few distraction-free months in which to concentrate. But now he was getting dragged into the middle of life’s confusions. Worrying about having children with Ariel; worrying about Ariel’s father — it wasn’tg a good time to be dealing with these problems. A part of him wished that he could refuse all this, just close the door on it all and do his work. But of course you can’t refuse it; you mustn’t even try. You have to let it in.

I’m not quite sure why this strikes me as a related thought, but when I was in Barnes & Noble yesterday, I saw a rack of inexpensive editions of classic novels. I had just picked up a copy of James Hamilton’s The Slaves of Solitude, which I fully intend, for what it’s worth (not much), not to open until I have finished Diary of a Bad Year, because George Snyder wrote that he was reading it and because there had been an interesting write-up in Bookforum, while Kathleen, whose idea this visit to B&N had been, looked at beading magazines. Looking at the rows of seriously great and deeply satisfying novels — Emma! Middlemarch! — I was overcome by the strangest sense of luxury. I had all of those books at home; what was more, I knew that I really liked reading them. I could just return to the apartment and curl up in a chair with one of them. Life could be that simple! If only…

He’s right: you mustn’t even try.

A small confession: I wrote an important part of today’s piece before I saw the movie. In fact, I woke myself very early morning, thinking that I would lull myself to sleep by thinking what I would say about Diane Lane but becoming so involved in the syntax that further snoozing was out of the question. As I was tucked under the covers, unequipped with writing materials, I forgot almost all of my finer points, but the spirit of my remarks stayed with me, and were only confirmed by Ms Lane’s latest film.

Once upon a time, telling you how much older I was than the actress in question would have made only me seem old. Now that I am sixty, those days are over. We shall draw a veil.

¶ Untraceable.

It was only a little over four years ago, in the fall of 2003, that M le Neveu began to insist that I start up a blog. My strenuous opposition to the idea was partly rooted in my fear that I’d become a slave to the project — a not unreasonable misgiving, if easily lifted when I recognized that the only difference between slavery and a vocation is the vocation — and ownership. Far more than that, though, I was put off by odor of sophomoric self-indulgence that blogs seemed — or were reported — to give off. One man I talked to dismissed blogs as “what I had for dinner last night.” The very term, Web log, suggested dear-diary entries, and the feedback element, the comments, seemed thoroughly questionable. Not for me!

Four years later, in any case, I have certainly changed my mind about blogging. Comments remain to be sorted out, I think, and I’ve been thinking hard about how to reconceive them (without requiring any changes in the code). I expect that I shall, though, and my belief in the virtues of the Web log as a literary form has never been more intense. It’s dispiriting, therefore, to see that The New York Review of Books is still publishing the kind of thinking that would have kept me away from reading blogs, much less writing one myself, if it had not been for a brilliant graduate student’s impassioned advocacy. (I refer to M le Neveu.)

As promised on Monday, a few words about the kind of coverage that Web logs are getting — almost as childish as the blog writing that it focuses on.*

¶ Sarah Boxer on Blogs, in The New York Review of Books.

* Once again, thanks to George Snyder for linking me to Ms Boxer’s piece a day before the hard copy arrived.