Shamsher Wadud used to run a glittering restaurant high above Central Park, Nirvana. Now he is confined to a nursing home that (as columnist James Barron notes) does not lie within the 212 area code. Blame his fall on the poor foundations of New York real estate — and on Mr Wadud’s bad judgment.  

In the tiny half-room the other day, Mr. Wadud talked about wanting to go back to Manhattan, to that different life. “But I cannot figure a way to get the place back, or the restaurant back,” he said. And what with his insurance complications and financial straits, his friends worry that he may have to move to another nursing home.

“The freedom in America in a way is very good,” he said, “but for some it is living hell.”

It must be nice to see his name in the paper, though.

For a few years, we had the custom of celebrating the year’s three anniversaries at La Grenouille, and I hope to revert to it later this year, but it appears that we’ve taken a break through a full cycle. We missed Kathleen’s birthday in April and our anniversary in October. The arrival of Will had something to do with this; certainly Kathleen’s onerous workload in the Fall made the prospect of dressing up for a lavish dinner more burdensome than delightful. And now we are on the eve of my birthday, and, what do you know, I’m cooking myself. If everything goes as planned, we will be eight at table tomorrow night, from Fossil, the oldest, to Will, who of course just turned one.

Last Friday (New Year’s Eve), I prepared a lunch for four to welcome friends from Geneva, and I put a fair amount of thought and effort into it, such that I wasn’t in the mood, when I woke up this morning, to be taking pains in the kitchen. So I settled on the easy and royal route of beef tenderloin. I’ll roast the thing in the oven and serve it with a sauce of chanterelles in cream. We’ll start with a vegetable risotto — leeks, corn, and poivron. As long as I was at Agata & Valentina for the tenderloin, I picked up one of their opera cakes.

Oh, and asparagus — always asparagus. With one of the egg sauces that ends in “aise.”

The thing is, I watched Julie & Julia twice. In the kitchen. I’d worked my way through a series of pictures about anglophones in Italy — Up at the Villa, My House in Umbria, and Under the Tuscan Sun. That’s when I got my hands on As Always, Julia; so the next movie had to be Julie & Julia. I watch kitchen movies while I’m in the kitchen, pausing them when my work is done. I’m talking about movies that I’ve seen tens of times. I didn’t really mean to watch Julie & Julia twice, but when I went into the kitchen to fix dinner and hit the “play” button, what came up were the closing credits. I couldn’t think of anything else that I wanted to watch, so I just played it again.

Watching Nora Ephron’s movie once might inspire anybody to whip up an interesting meal or two, but watching it twice has the opposite effect. The ladies are almost always hard at work at something, and Julia, of course, is always well turned-out. Julie actually claims to make her aspic with a calf’s foot, a stunt that at my most wildly ambitious (twenty-odd years ago) I never attempted. Who knows what we’d have had for lunch last Friday if the double-single-feature had played out last week! Here’s what we did have: salmon mousse. A very old-fashioned salmon mousse, made from a recipe that I got from a friend who insists that she is not a cook — a recipe that calls for a blender. And a can of salmon. I bought a pound of arctic char and poached it, and dissolved the gelatin in a ladle of the bouillon, but I followed the recipe with regard to the mayonnaise — it called for Hellmann’s — instead of making my own. If I’d watched Julie & Julia first, I’d have been ashamed to cut so many corners. No calf’s foot? You call Knox gelatin cooking?

The chanterelle sauce is an outgrowth of one of my favorite dishes, a sauté of chicken with mushrooms. At some point last year, I had the idea of thickening the sauce with cream, and there was no going back. Bubbly thickened cream and sautéed mushrooms combine to produce the compleat savoriness of umami.

There are readers who will no doubt insist that any meal involving hollandaise or béarnaise sauce is not simple, but there are a few clever things that I’ve done so many times that I don’t have to think about them, so that fuss is not involved. Call it recklessness, rather: whisking eggs and butter over direct heat is asking for trouble. I go into a mad sort of trance, moving the little saucepan to and from the heat as if it were on a bungee cord and throwing in dice of frozen butter (that’s the trick of it) until there’s no more butter, and the sauce is perfect.

One of the treats of watching Julie & Julia twice while reading As Always, Julia is piling up instances of anachronism in the Julia parts. Almost every mention of Avis DeVoto in the movie is contradicted by letters, at least as regards when things happened. (This is not a problem; the alterations all make for a better movie.) And of course Avis DeVoto plays a much bigger role in the book! Julia Child’s epistolary style will be familiar to anyone who has actually read her cookbooks (and not just followed the recipes), but Avis DeVoto’s voice is quite different, racier somehow, and enthusiastic in a way that makes Child seem ladylike by comparison.

Your news about your transfer to the south is staggering. I didn’t even know that Paul was in public service. Is it State Department? Of course I share your regrets about leaving Paris — but I am certain that you can work out the details of the cooking research, and as you point out, there’s all that wonderful Provençale cooking. Frogs legs, Provençale — ah me. Until the old Lafayette Hotel in New York folded up, every New York trip took me straight to that ugly dining room to eat frogs’ legs dripping in garlic and butter, and their gratinéed potatoes which were the best in the world.

I’d much rather be reading Avis DeVoto than struggling with the book that she brought into being.

After years of reports about chaos and mayhem in Iraq, Anthony Shadid’s upbeat report, “Resurgent Turkey Flexes Its Muscles Around Iraq” is both welcome and extremely discordant. I hope that we’ll be able to follow the fortunes of Rushdi Said.

“This is the very beginning,” said Rushdi Said, the flamboyant Iraqi Kurdish chairman of Adel United, a company involved in everything from mining to sprawling housing projects. “All of the world has started fighting over Iraq. They’re fighting for the money.”

Mr. Said’s suit, accented by a black-and-white handkerchief in the pocket, shines like his optimism, the get-rich-quick kind. In some ways, he is a reincarnation of an Ottoman merchant, at ease in Kurdish, Turkish, Persian and Arabic. In any of those languages, he boasts of what he plans.

He has thought of contacting Angelina Jolie, “maybe Arnold and Sylvester, too,” to interest them in some of his 11 projects across Iraq to build 100,000 villas and apartments at the cost of a few billion dollars. So far, though, his best partner is the singer Ibrahim Tatlises, the Turkish-born Kurdish superstar, whose portrait adorns Mr. Said’s advertisement for his project the Plain of Paradise.

“The villas are ready!” Mr. Tatlises says in television ads. “Come! Come! Come!”

We had no idea that the Russian Orthodox Church has regained so much of its Tsarist-era influence that it was able to squelch celebrations of the centennial of Tolstoy’s death.

The church’s letter of response, published in a state-run newspaper, Rossiyskaya Gazeta, suggested not. It acknowledged Tolstoy’s “unforgettable, beautiful works,” and said Russian Orthodox readers were allowed to say solitary prayers for him on the anniversary of his death.

But its tone was mournful, calling Tolstoy the most “tragic personality” in the history of Russian literature. It said that Tolstoy “purposely used his great talent to destroy Russia’s traditional spiritual and social order” and that it was “no accident that the leader of the Bolsheviks extremely valued the aim of Leo Tolstoy’s activity.” So there could be no candles burned for Tolstoy inside Orthodox churches and no commemorations read, according to the letter, signed by the cultural council secretary to Patriarch Kirill I, the church’s leader.

In the middle of Colm Tóibín’s new collection of short fiction, The Empty Family, there is a story called “Barcelona, 1975.” Its artistry is considerable. An erotic souvenir of the writer’s youth, it revisits the season in which Francisco Franco died and the city that he most mistrusted came to life. The slice of life that interests the author is, understandably, Barccelona’s gay community — anachronistic as that label would have been — and most of the action is set in a top-floor warren of rooms constituting apartments within an apartment. There is a painter, a literature student, an unspecified partner at an orgy, and then the narrator’s lover. The story sticks to the surface and avoids motivation; the only thing that the narrator discloses about himself is that he was very lonely until he met the painter and the student; prior to that encounter, he wished that he had never left Dublin. The painter and the literature student introduce him to a new world, one in which motivation is obvious, manifest in the form of erect penises. Several of these are seen in action. When the narrator leaves his lover, however, there is no explanation. It is impossible to say what, if anything, “happened.”

I stopped seeing my lover. Six months later, however, when I got a flat around the corner from Plaza Real, I discovered that he had moved to another flat on the same floor of the building where we had met. If he was home, the lights were visible from one of the streets betweeen Escudellers and the Plaza Real. Sometimes when I walked home I would check the light and if I was feeling in the right mood I would call in to him. He would play his old game of talking and listening as though there were no sexual charge between us. And then I would move towards him and touch him, and, just like the first time, he would remain still, in his lovely old trance. This transformation from the social to the sexual, which I could do in a split second, took him time. And then he was ready.

All these years later, I can still take pleasure in the tight, hard shape of him, his tongue, the knob of his dick, the glitter of his eyes, his shy smile. I always knew that if I did not keep him, he would go. Someone else would claim him.

And that’s precisely what happens in the next, and final paragraph of the story.

The second time I read the story, I knew what was coming, and the graphic descriptions of love-making were not as obtrusive. But I still thought that the story would be better without them. (I know that I would feel much the same if the characters were men and women engaging in heterosexual sex.) The art of fiction is concerned with the recreation of states of mind, and nothing punctures the illusion faster than the hard, physical detail that the reader finds unsympathetic or incomprehensible. Or, conversely, arousing. I do not think that the reader whose libido quickens in response to a story is capable of giving it complete attention. In the end, detailing acts of love reduces the lovers to pipes and plungers: so much plumbing. I want to know why the narrator “stopped seeing” his lover. I remain interested in motivations. I haven’t been to Barcelona, and I’d rather hoped that Colm Tóibín would take me, but that’s not something that interests him. 

In the story that concludes the collection, “The Street,” however — but that’s another story for another day.

We went through the paper five times this morning and this was the only story that held our attention: Sabrina Tavernise’s report of the discovery, over the weekend, of the body of John P Wheeler III, a man of parts who among other things spearheaded the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. In a landfill, being dumped from a garbage truck.

Mr. Wheeler had been involved in a dispute over the construction of a home in his neighborhood, said his lawyer, Bayard Marin, but it was not clear whether that was part of the homicide investigation. Since 2008, Mr. Wheeler and his wife, Katherine Klyce, had been involved in civil litigation to stop the construction of a home near the parking lot of Battery Park in Old New Castle, which the Wheelers claimed was too big. The case remains unresolved in Delaware courts.

“This case has all the intrigue of a murder mystery,” Mr. Marin said. “There’s ongoing litigation, but I would put that pretty far down the list.”

That’s because it is a murder mystery.

Alistair McCauley, having seen more than two dozen different productions of The Nutcracker around the country, has listened to eleven complete recordings and distinguished the ones that dance from the ones that don’t. His favorite is the third recording that Antal Dorati made, in 1974.

My final choice, however, is Dorati. In the Concertgebouw he has the most miraculous orchestral playing of all: the moment the strings enter their first phrase in the (Sugar Plum or Féedragée) adagio is just the most sensational, and there are many such inspiring moments throughout. The main reason to love this recording, however – and I keep returning to it, the last of three by Dorati – is to feel his sense of the shape of each dance and its place in this whole: the dances have the lift and sweep of footwork within them, the waltzes are buoyant, and the internal drama is moment by moment in motion. If ever I lost interest in this music, it is to this sublime recording I would return to recover it.

The first new book of the new year: As Always, Julia: The Letters of Julia Child & Avis DeVoto, edited by Joan Reardon. There is nothing I like better than a book of correspondence, with letters exchanged between two people presented in date order; and there are few masters of English prose who rival Julia Child’s command of serious fun. Of even greater interest to me is the letters’ tracing of Child’s later-life self-invention, which, I gather from reviews, was not smooth. “Alternately self-assured and self-doubting,” writes Reardon, describing the Child of the letters; in the Book Review, Corby Kummer puts it more strongly: “alternately confident to the point of arrogance and insecure almost to the point of giving up.” That sounds familiar. I try not to be arrogant about what I’m doing here, and I never even whisper words about giving up, but I bounce back and forth between the outer suburbs of both extremes. Child was lucky to have the friendship of a woman who understood the world from a less angular point of view.

Right at the moment I’m not in the middle of a heatedly active correspondence; partly this is because all I want to talk about is my glorious grandson who is so supremely remarkable and unlike all other children ever born. (Yes, sometimes even Kathleen wishes that she had a hearing aid that she could turn off.) Partly it is because I’m engaged in writing what amounts to an open letter to everybody. (You’re reading it.) Mostly, though, it’s because I haven’t found the right partner for the kind of dance that intrigues me at the moment. (And that partner hasn’t found me.)

What I want even more than a correspondent at the moment is a rival, a competitor, somebody else who is doing what I’m doing — whatever that is. Indeed, it’s when I get to see somebody doing what I’m doing that I’ll know what it is that I’m doing. Gun to my head? I’m scouting the Internet for visions of a better world, one that’s more mindful, less wasteful, and wholly humane. I’m trying to figure out how to make the values and resources that we associate with “the elite” comprehensible and available to everyone. Sounds pretty quixotic — but in the absence of a sparring partner my mind can’t be bothered to work any harder at its job description.

The genesis of the Child-DeVoto correspondence is oblique and could not have been predicted. Child wrote a letter to Bernard DeVoto, a Harvard professor and a columnist at Harper’s, in response to his piece about dull kitchen knives. (She enclosed an inexpensive but sound French knife.) Her letter was answered, as was most of his mail (one gathers), by his wife and gal Friday, Avis. Avis was described by one of her husband’s students, Reardon tells us, as “very good looking and very sexy-seeming and the only faculty wife who might have said ‘horseshit’ to President Lowell.” She liked to cook, too. Best of all, she had entrée to the world of publishing. But none of these datapoints explains why she and Child (a) hit it off and (b) exchanged hundreds of letters. You might as well explain it in terms of feng shui.

Perhaps, if Will’s extraordinariness would only dwindle a bit this year, I might become more attentive to the rest of the world. Until then, I can only ask you to keep your eyes out.

In today’s Times, Salman Masood reports that the Muttahida Quaumi Movement has withdrawn from Pakistran’s ruling parliamentary coalition — but why? Not to bring down the government, it seems. Perhaps it would be better to say that no one wants to take the present government’s place.

Arif Rafiq, a political analyst based in Washington, agreed. “No one wants to rule in Islamabad right now,” Mr. Rafiq said. “The economy is a mess, and the International Monetary Fund is pushing the federal government to impose deeply unpopular taxes. I do not anticipate a push for a confidence vote or the fall of the government in the next few months.”

In our view, Pakistan’s dysfunction is by far the biggest international problem facing the United States. We’re sorry to read that the MQM is playing with matches.

Will was here today — his father brought him up for a visit — and here’s what I wish I had a photograph of: when it came time to go, I took his hand and walked him into the bedroom, where Kathleen was taking a nap, so that he could say goodbye to Darney (as she is to him). As we crossed below the bed’s footboard, Will’s left arm shot up. It was as though he were dying to answer the teacher’s question, but there was also a touch of revival-meeting hallelujah. I knew what he was trying to tell me, thanks to a tip from his mother: Will has a settled preference for being held by his left hand, the one that I wasn’t holding. I complied immediately; but I thought how interesting it is that Will’s media arsenal doesn’t include vocalization. The sounds that he makes — and he’s becoming quite a singer — are for his own enjoyment. I wonder what he makes of us, the grandparents who talk more or less incessantly. Or do I: he probably knows that we’re enjoying ourselves, too.

(On the elevator, coming or going I forget which, a group of women noticed Will’s eyelashes, which are preposterously long, just as Peter O’Toole’s eyes are preposterously blue. There are predatory insects that would kill to have Will’s eyelashes for antennae.)

The Sunday after the holidays — is the feeling of letdown inevitable or, as Kathleen puts it, is it a “really don’t want to go back to work tomorrow” state of mind? I certainly don’t want to go back to work — and I’m my own boss! The first couple of weeks, if not the first few months of the New Year are going to be difficult, largely because I’m hugely unhappy with WordPress, the platform on which this Web log is produced. For a long time, I was used to being unhappy with WordPress, but when I began to meditate changes (improvements) for the New Year, I saw that we must part, WordPress and I. Four years ago, I broke up with MovableType. Now I’m thinking of breaking up with blogging itself, and reverting to my happy old ways of rolling out a Web site. But enough about housekeeping. (Thursday is my birthday; I am almost sixty-two years older than my grandson.)

The other day, at Crawford Doyle, I spied The Empty Family, a new collection of short stories by Colm Tóibín. I hadn’t heard a thing about it, probably because Ms NOLA is out of town for the holidays. Wednesday was the 29th of last year, and I read most of the book in 2010, but the copyright notice dates the book to January 2011, so I have really been living in the future these latter days. Three stories stand out — although before I say another word I have to confess that I did not re-read “The Colour of Shadows,” which appeared in The New Yorker a while back. I skipped over it and went straight to “The Street,” which is more of a short novella than a long short story. Imagine Brooklyn, only set among the Pakistani community of Barcelona instead of the Irish community of King’s County, and with a young gay man in the spotlight. Was it written before or after the novel? Also striking: “The New Spain,” in which a lapsed Communist returns to her native Catalonia after the death of Franco and, basically, gives her family the finger. (I don’t even want to think about where Tóibín got the chained refrigerator bit.) There’s also a lovely story, “The Pearl Fishers,” in which the narrator is as vinegary as the author. I’ll save my thoughts about the “graphic sex” in The Empty Family for a reading note. Note to Migs: I’m sending you a copy, and you (and the author) know why!

My friend JRParis wrote a lovely valedictory for 2010 that matches Tóibín’s gift for melting appeal. Jean lists a few of the things that he did last year, but even more things that he didn’t do. Near the end, a calamity that always strikes me as American, even though it killed Camus: one of Jean’s friends died in an automobile accident. That’s all that he says about it, and his late friend’s name is the only one in the entry. In the hands of a lesser writer, one might be annoyed, but Jean prompted me to mount a very discreet roadside  memorial to Francis Grossmann; if I don’t know anything about the dead man himself, I will remember his name, and who but a gifted writer can make anybody do that?

Kathleen is finishing up Guns, Germs, and Steel. “I’m loving this book,” she says. I told her she would — how many years ago? But her curiosity was piqued when Ryan saw it on a bookshelf in the blue room and mentioned it as a book that Megan really ought to read. The next time I read something that I think my wife would like, I’ll have to figure out a way to get Ryan to recommend it to his! (There’s a crazy Golden Bowl vibe humming there that I’m not going to explore!) Kathleen’s next book: The Help. I am very proud of having recognized Kathryn Stockett’s book as a deserving best-seller when a pre-publication copy was sent to me; the Manhattan publishing mafia has still refused to do justice to this wonderful novel.

A few weeks ago, Will started pointing at things. Sometimes he means: “I know what that that is,” but for the most part he’s telling us that he wants got get closer to (ie possess) something. I had a little game with him today of pointing back. This delighted him. He stretched forward and pretended to bite my index finger. Meta Meta Meta!

Another year! How they pile up. Or rather, how they melt in the mind, into hosts of memories with puzzlingly different time-stamps. Right after taking in a movie that you think you saw “ages ago,” you had dinner with a friend “just the other day.” And then there are the intense experiences that simultaneously whoosh right by while taking forever. All of 2010 was one such experience for me, and today I celebrate its first anniversary, in the birthday of our grandson Will, who seems to have arrived only yesterday but who has palpably been with us always.

The most important thing that I heard in 2010 was William Gibson’s remark (made more than a few years ago) that the future is already here, but unevenly distributed. That’s another way of saying that, while almost nothing ever really happens, everything is happening all the time. Will is a bit of a baby, and a bit of a young adult, but he is mostly a little boy. The only statement that makes complete sense is also completely tautological: Will is — Will.  

As are we all; all of us are more complicated than we can know, even if we could strip away the callouses of inattentiveness and the built-in oblivion that make life bearably uneventful. I can’t tell you how much of me is sitting here writing, how much stuck somewhere in last week’s projects, or how much has shot ahead in pursuit of, among other things, plans for the ongoing development of this Web log. All of me that’s present wishes you very hearty good wishes for the New Year — and all of me that’s anywhere thanks you for reading.