Gotham Diary:
Épuisé
I’ve headed this entry with the French word for “exhausted” because, given that it’s French, I suppose, and therefore a term that I have to think about, however fleetingly, it actually means “used up” to me. “Exhausted” means used up, too, technically, but its strong everyday meaning is just another word for “tired.” I’m not just tired, though; I’m used up, physically, and I’ve been running a sort of temporal deficit for two or three months now. There haven’t been enough hours to do everything that I’ve signed up to do. In a red-alert, heart-attack sense, as distinguished from the familiar too-many-books-too-little-time complaint.
Something was going to have to go, and it kills me to say that what’s going to go is my Thursdays with Will. Megan will be returning to work full-time-at-the-office next month, and Will will spend Thursdays just as he spends the other weekdays, at his coolisssimo day care in SoHo. I have promised myself that Thursdays will be repitched to the upkeep of Civil Pleasures, which site I have totally neglected these past two weeks. I have to work up a template for new pages before I continue posting there, and I can only hope that I’ll be able to design it before September.
But I’d rather go on running the temporal deficit. Except that I couldn’t. I’d be either a dishonest or a lousy grandparent if I said that helping to take care of a small child for even just one day a week is a breeze; it’s not. But although Will might tire me out, he doesn’t use me up; what uses me up is the shortage of sheer blank hours to do what I want to do here. If my Thursdays with Will were to continue, I now understand, I’ have to ratchet back my expectations for these sites of mine. Which I would do willingly. What’s more important, reviewing the Book Review or taking Will for a walk? What has bothered me most in the past couple of weeks is knowing that, even if I gave up the Book Review review, I’d still find it difficult to get round to writing about that walk with Will.
For the first time in ages, I got to the end of this week without having written my review of the Book Review. I toyed with the idea of abandoning the feature; it has taught me what I needed to learn. I’ve developed a clear understanding of what the Book Review ought to be, along with a rather dispiriting conviction that this ideal Book Review is never going to be published by The New York Times. But who knows? I’ve decided to keep my hand in, but on far less demanding terms. I’ll write about the good reviews and the awful reviews, and mark the reviews that don’t belong in the Book Review in the first place with silence. Truth to tell, I’m tired of reading the Book Review — it’s so utterly mediocre. (The worst weeks are the ones when Liesl Schillinger, my great hope for literary understanding at the Book Review, turns in something that’s not up to her own standards. Such lapses are inevitable; I oughtn’t to have to count on one gifted reviewer. No, the worst is when Walter Kirn plays it safe and pretends not to understand a genuinely edgy book. )
I’ll close this housekeeping entry (which I haven’t dared to present as such, preferring to masquerade as a diarist) with two notes. First, I want to write about yesterday’s walk up and down 86th Street with Will. And about this evenings top-notch Mostly Mozart concert at Avery Fisher Hall. Second, I want you to know that I love compiling the Daily Office. The more I do it, the sharper my sense of what it ought to be like becomes — and the more difficult to find suitable pages to link to. If I’m used up, it’s in no small part because I glance throught three to six hundred feeds a day, reading about twenty long ones from beginning to end. Most of what I read, obviously, never appears here. You’d think, though, that it would be easy to harvest eight good links a day from such a mass of input. But it’s hard, and it gets harder. And I love what I do.
Which is another good reason for complaining in a foreign language.