Having stayed up late, watching almost all the rest of Miranda but saving the last episode for later, I loitered on in bed the next morning, encouraged to do nothing more constructive by the knowledge that Kathleen, who stayed up even later than I did, wasn’t about to get up anytime soon. Although I’d proposed going to see To Rome With Love this morning, I saw at once that it would never happen, and that the better plan, if plan it would be, would be to make a simple breakfast and keep Kathleen in bed until one or so, when she would (will!) rouse herself for her Saturday-afternoon trip to midtown, to have her hair washed and dried. There was no hurry on the breakfast, either, so I crawled back into bed with Tessa Hadley’s The London Train and read the last twenty pages. A sweet way to begin the weekend!

The London Train is full of magic — magic being entirely a matter of encountering someone else at the right time in the right place. Or not: at the end of the novel, estranged spouses spend the night in one another’s empty houses, and this is precisely what their relationship needs in order to carry on. This almost ritual, but unconscious, separation, each exploring the other’s not-unfamiliar turf. (Cora, the wife, has retreated in the estrangement to her late parents’ house in Cardiff, which she is doing over in order to sell it when it becomes, instead, a haven. But on the very night that Robert comes to visit, she sleeps in the spare room of the Regent’s Park flat that she shared with him for over ten years. What she discovers is that he has been sleeping in the spare room, too.  

***

Variation on a theme: pork chops with pear, honey, mustard, and sage. My everyday pork chop dish, taken from Classic Home Cooking, calls for boneless chops, cut into two pieces if they’re very thick, to be slathered with mustard, brown sugar, and orange juice, with peeled orange slices between the mustard and the brown sugar on the top side. Kathleen is very fond of this dish, and I associate it with winter, not because it’s heavy but because it’s hearty. I wanted something less robust when I made it the other night. I bought a nice hard bosc pair and peeled it; then I grated it into a bowl. I added two spoonfuls of thick local honey, a little more than that of grainy mustard, and a dusting of dried sage. This stirred up into a cohesive paste, which I spread on each side of the chops and which I was delighted to find adhering to the chops when I removed them to the dinner plates with a spatula. Although wary of the novelty at first — that local honey is very strong and earthy — Kathleen decided that she liked it very much. I shall experiment with different honeys, and also with chopped fresh sage.

I served the pork chops with boiled arborio rice — yay! why did I never think to boil it before? — and one of the very first vegetables that I learned how to cook: summer squash steamed with dill.

***

Shortly before leaving the flat on Friday morning to join Ray Soleil for an early showing of Les Adieux à la Reine down at the Angelika, Kathleen, who had just left, called from the street to warn me that the regular elevators were out of service, mostly, and that everyone was crowding into the service elevator. Knowing how long it might take to get out of the building, I decided to descend by stairs. At the sixth floor, I paused to check on the elevators, and was happy to see that one was just about to stop where I was. But I might as well have taken the stairs all the way to the ground, because the damage was done. By Saturday afternoon, I was hobbling about like a foot-bound tai-tai, and my right leg would barely flex enough to step into shorts. I managed to do all my Saturday chores, but there was no thought of making an interesting dinner. I pulled out a small container (ample for the two of us) of Agata & Valentina’s okay bolognese lasagne. Later, I fell asleep in my chair, reading Timothy Mo’s An Insular Possession, a fat historical novel about Hong Kong that, when it finally fell to the floor about an hour and a half after I’d dropped off, according to Kathleen, woke me up and sent me to bed.

On Sunday morning, Kathleen and I went across the street to see To Rome With Love. Kathleen wanted me to wait to see it for the first time with her (such a romantic!), and I did, on the understanding that we’d see it on a weekend morning. Everyone at the 11:20 showing was my age or older, and we all liked it very much. It’s not as simply delightful as Midnight in Paris, but it is as full of magic as all of Woody Allen’s movies seem to be lately. The biggest trick of all is that the four plotlines that the movie weaves together run on different time-scales (one lasts hardly more than an afternoon, while another clearly takes weeks) without the slightest cognitive jar. Certain bits made me laugh to the point of tears, but the final scene, a nighttime, overhead shot of a (stationary) marching band playing “Volare” on the Spanish Steps, took me straight to the tears. Just thinking about it afterward, I could feel my face go a bit rubbery. Judy Davis has all the best lines. One of them appears in the trailer: when her character’s husband, played by the filmmaker, preens about his IQ of 156, she tells him that he’s “figuring in euros.” In an even better line, when he brags that his psychology can’t be made to fit the Freudian scheme, she agrees: “You have three ids.”

About Les Adieux à la Reine, my response was more complicated; I was certain that there was much in Benoît Jacquot’s film that I felt going over my head. Such as the dahlia that the central character, Sidonie (Léa Seydoux) a young woman who reads to Marie-Antoinette (Diane Kruger), is asked to embroider for the queen, even as the roof is caving in on the régime. How does Sidonie feel about the unpopular queen? I was never quite sure. I came to feel that I wasn’t expected to be sure. The film is a meditation of sorts on still-controversial aspects of French history. It might be thought of as a masque, if so many of its scenes weren’t shot in dull backstairs locations. The Galerie des glaces figures in one shot, as does the staircase in the Petite Trianon. The queen has a tête-à-tête with her favorite, the princesse de Polignac (Virginie Ledoyen) against the background of some very opulent satin upholstery, and Ms Kruger herself is the finest Marie-Antoinette yet to appear in film (if you ask me). But this is not a movie about luxe. What it does capture (I imagine) is the claustral, anxiously gossipy world of the great château in its final days as the seat of government. Nobody really knows what’s going on — a state of affairs that would plague France for years to come.

***

On Sunday afternoon, I attacked the overflowing basket of magazines. I read only five periodicals with regularity: The New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, Harper’s, and Vanity Fair. Several times a year — Sunday was one of them — I wade through several issues of BBC Music, a publication that drowns me in information and guilt when consumed in this manner. I ripped out five or six pages from four issues; the next step is to order the CDs written up thereupon. Several hours seemed to pass in this manner. Then I picked up Vanity Fair, and quickly concluded, what’s the use. Every page informed me that I have lived my life to no purpose; I shall never be one of the great and good who glitter so handsomely from its pages. I’m beginning to feel that keeping track of the great and the good is beyond me.

Reading James Wolcott on the celebrity magazines whose headlines I peruse, bewildered, on the checkout line at Gristede’s, I inched a bit closer to understanding what he calls “the Kardashian Imperium.” As I say, what’s the use?

In Tessa Hadley’s new novel, The London Train, fortysomething Paul’s life unravels after his mother’s death. Adrift in London, he finds himself at Heathrow.

It occurred to him that he could go anywhere, right now. There were all those thousands sitting in his account, enough to buy himself a ticket; and his passport was — he checked — still in the back pocket of these trousers. On the way to Heathrow, he had had no thought other than returning with Marek into London after the meeting. But Marek could drive himself. Sooner or later, in the next week or so, Paul had meant to go back to Elise and the girls at Tre Rhiw: that was his real life. But what if he didn’t go back? What if his life continued somewhere else, and was real differently? The lettered shutters spelling out the names on the board flickered over with their soft susurration: Dubrovnik, Rome, Odessa, Cairo, Damascus. His idea wasn’t cerebral; the assault of his desire for it, dropping through him like a current, unhinged him momentarily. He had enough money, even if he gave half to Elise, for a ticket anywhere, and a room when he got there. A room while he sorted himself out. Enough money to get by for a while because he knew how to live frugally.

For ten or twenty minutes, while he dwelled inside this possibility, it was so real that he felt afterwards the unfinished gesture in his muscles, his clenched jaw; he had meant to walk over to the information desk, ask about last-minute tickets, find out where he could go, get out his card from his wallet, pay. He would have to take the van keys back to Marek. It was a door that stood open, through which he could walk lightly, carrying nothing. This was the sort of thing he used to do; something unfinished in him, which had been set aside and forgotten, stepped up to the adventure with fast-beating heart. He imaged himself walking out from a room somewhere, in a few hours, into a different light: to buy clothes, toothbrush, razor, which he would not know the names for. He could find a bar to eat in, or buy food on the street. The place might be dirty and paoor, it might have some ramparts where the population strolled to take the air in the evenings, it might overlook the sea, it might not. Paul felt himself at a pivot in his life, swinging dangerously loose: if he moved, he would go over to the information desk and everything would follow from there. He had only to keep still. If he went, he couldn’t be forgiven, or forgive himself — freedom would carve out an empty space in him forever. A message drifted through his cells, from his bones, that he must keep still. Eventually Marek came to find him.

***

At the end of Amor Towles’s The Rules of Civility, Kate looks back on youth.

It is a bit of a cliché to characterize life as a rambling journey on which we can alter our course at any given time — by the slightest turn of the wheel, the wisdom goes, we influence the chain of events and thus recast our destiny with new cohorts, circumstances, and discoveries. But for the most of us, life is nothing like that. Instead, we have a few brief periods when we are offered a handful of discrete options. Do I take this job or that job? In Chicago or New York? Do I join this circle of friends or that one, and with whom do I go home at the end of the night? And does one make time for children now? Or later? Or later still?

In that sense, life is less like a journey than it is a game of honeymoon bridge. In our twenties, when there is still so much time ahead of us, time that seems ample for a hundred indecisions, for a hundred visions and revisions — we draw a card, and we must decide right then and there whether to keep the card or discard the next, or discard the first card and keep the second. And before we know it, the deck has been played out and the decisions we have jusst made will shape our lives for decades to come.

We’re running a little late this morning. Just a little. I thought that I’d be in bed early last night, after such an early start, but I was too elated by the two final episodes of Call the Midwife that I watched after Ryan took Will home after dinner. It took an hour to wind down, for lively memories of Jessica Raine, Miranda Hart, Judy Parfitt and the others to subside sufficiently to allow me to pick up Tessa Hadley’s new novel, The London Train. When I got into bed, I wondered if having been knocked out with genuine anaesthesia earlier in the day would blunt Lunesta’s power, but it didn’t.

Call the Midwife was one of those discoveries peculiar to the Internet Age (a fatuous term, I hope, for the rest of human time). It’s the kind of discovery that you make because it’s so effortless. Having been tipped that Miranda is a a very funny show, you see what “people who bought” it have also bought. The buying, by the way, has been going on at a site run for British consumers; miraculously, it is possible for you, a New Yorker, to buy things there, too. (I still can’t quite believe that, fifteen years in.) You have no idea what Call the Midwife will be like, but you’re willing to give it a go because this Miranda person is in it. Something, some unconscious neuronal app, assures you that the show will be interesting at least.

It takes a few weeks for you to get round to watching it. In the end, you select it from the pile in hopes of being distracted from the inadequacy of a Jell-O diet. And, boy, does it ever come through on that score.

***

Let me tell you the shameful thing first: Call the Midwife made me burstingly proud, at least during the first two episodes (there are six), that I had never yielded to the (very slight) temptation to follow Downton Abbey, because instead of wrapping myself up in the sociologically sordid mixings of aristocrats and their servants, back in the day when aristos had not only had servants but also much more interesting wardrobes, I was hooking myself on a paean to the National Health Service (in its early days, at least, when there was so much less that medicine could do for people, beyond keeping them clean and comfortable and deploying a few new antibiotics), cloaked in a well-oiled drama about well-brought-up young ladies serving as nurse-midwives in London’s East End in the late Fifties. It is, in effect, an inversion of Downton Abbey, because it’s the East Enders who are fortunate: despite their poverty and their ignorant ways, they have all the babies, and they have them right on the show, with an explicitness undreamable in 1957. At the appearance of each newborn, everybody laughs and cries, and so do you. It really doesn’t get more uplifting than that, not on television anyway. 

In this upside-down version of the typical Masterpiece Theatre offering, it is the proper young ladies who serve the working class. They are guided by nuns of an Anglican order who mission is the delivery of children. These nuns are a devout but worldly lot, mostly former proper young ladies themselves but not exclusively: we have the great Pam Ferris to leaven the language (which is very much, by the way, the language of Shakespeare and Keats; instead of prayers and metaphysics, the good sisters spout an English that is more robust than the vernacular without being flowery). Call the Midwife is stocked with many familiar characters, but the deck has been dealt out in a new way. Not entirely new, perhaps; you could argue, I suppose, that the show mixes EastEnders with Brother Cadfael, and tells the tale from the perspective of Pride and Prejudice. But you don’t turn to dramatic series for genuine novelty. Call the Midwife ends with a marriage, but it is a mésalliance. And yet this mésalliance, instead of being unspeakably secret (as indeed the bride’s mother would prefer it to be) is a triumph of love and courage, a marriage that might just impress Aunt Jane herself. It is the only kind of happy ending that does not involve the safe delivery of a healthy child.

Call the Midwife ran in Britain in January and February, I believe; whether it will be broadcast on this side of the Atlantic I have no idea. The DVD is already available at Amazuke, and, according to IMDb, some sort of Christmas Special is promised for the end of the year. If you have an all-regional DVD player, I urge you to order a copy of the show at once.

No comment!

***

Well, a little postscript won’t hurt. The procedure didn’t, either. Not that it ever has, really, but this time I was completely anaesthetized. Knocked out. It wasn’t the stuff that they’d used on the two or three previous colonoscopies; I could feel myself sinking into oblivion. But it was very short-term. The procedure was scheduled for 8 AM, and that is precisely when it began: I looked at the clock on the wall, moments before losing consciousness. When I came to, it was quarter-to-something; I thought that it must be ten, but, incredibly, it was 8:45. I don’t recall things happening anywhere near that quickly before, but then I haven’t ever actually looked at the clock before. When it was time to get off the gurney and put my clothes back on, I was a little wobbly for a few steps, but that was hardly surprising, given my age, the anaesthesia, and the fasting. By the time Ray Soleil picked me up, I was fine.

The prohibition on patients’ leaving the clinic on their own is very annoying. We are in Manhattan, after all, where taxis and car services abound. I have snuck out several times before, but this time it would not have been possible: a nurse saw me to the street door, and made sure that the passenger in the taxi knew who I was. Poor Ray — I’d told him that I wouldn’t need him for another hour. But the clinic asked for his number, and they called him while I was in recovery. He scrambled up quickly. As it turned out, Kathleen could easily have picked me up; she was still at home when we got back to the apartment. But we thought, as I say, that it would take longer.

As a veteran of umpteen colonscopies, I want to insist that there is only good reason for dreading the procedure: fasting is a great bore. A great bore. But about the procedure itself there is simply nothing to complain. Not any more. If only a visit to the dentist could be half as comfortable!

***

I hadn’t seen Ray in a while, so we had a lot of catching up to do. During lunch, at the Seahorse Tavern, we indulged in the favorite pastime of redesigning Fossil Darling’s apartment. If only he would listen to us! (But, as Mrs Grimmer says, “People are so queer!“)

***

Later on in the afternoon, I went downtown to fetch Will. Something had come up for his mother, and his father couldn’t get away. Of course they would have managed to get him if I hadn’t been around, but I was around. The car was waiting for us when we came outside, and the driver was by now familiar, having taken us uptown two times before, and we all shook hands in the driveway of our apartment building. Even (especially) Will, who had to transfer a toy bus from one hand to the other. 

Will likes to have a quiet time when he gets home, his mother tells me, and I took full advantage of this when we got to the apartment: I filled a bottle with milk, put on Sean the Sheep, and sat him on my lap. And there we were when Kathleen came home. Kathleen’s arrival signaled the end of Will’s rest period; now he led her on a merry dance throughout the apartment, now out on the balcony, now coloring on the living-room floor. When Ryan arrived after work, Will pulled out a story book about a “shark” and demanded that his father read it to him. Trouble was, the book is in Dutch, it was Ted van Lieshout’s Ik ben een held, with great drawings by Silvia Weve that do, in fact, make the eponym of the third story, “Blauw vis,” look like a shark. I am going to have to work up translations.

We had a quick dinner at Viand, the coffee shop on the corner across the street. When it was time to go, Will picked up his plate of French fries, to take it with. Kathleen worked out a compromise, and wrapped up the fries in a napkin. A few of these, transferred to a small bowl, were actually eaten back at the apartment.

What will it be like when the day no longer begins with fishing up the Times from the floor of the hallway outside our front door? I wondered about that yesterday morning as I looked through the Business section. (That’s how I begin, giving Kathleen first crack at the First Section.) There was a piece by David Carr on the latest mudslides in the newspaper business. The bottom line appears to be that newspapers have been as badly run as most American industries, and suffer from underfunded pension plans and scary debt service. (Close those goddam business schools before the country goes completely broke!) The peculiar problems of print journalism — competition from Internet media both for readers and for advertising dollars — don’t help, but one imagines that, without those generic business problems in the background, solutions might be more hopeful.

What will take the place of what is now called the “Sunday Review,” the weekly think pages of the newspaper, replete with editorials Op-Ed commentary? That’s what I used to wonder. This weekend, I felt that the replacement had arrived: thinking was giving way to nonsense. The lead story, “Don’t Indulge. Be Happy,” begins with a subtitle announcing that $75,000 is all the income that most people need to be satisfied with life. When you follow this piece into the heart of the section, two other equally dubious items appear: “The New Elitists” and “Why Conservatives Are Happier Than Liberals.”

While the “Happiness” piece is loaded with tidbits of good sense, the $75,000 figure looks very odd in a periodical aimed principally at upscale Manhattanites, most of whom would have to find somewhere else to live on a five-figure income, abandoning, in the process, the restaurants and dry cleaners and health clubs and food markets that currently employ thousands of people to serve the neighborhood, not to mention museum memberships and theatre subscriptions. I’m not saying that happiness can’t be found on $75,000. Not at all. I’m just saying that the mass search for it would kill Manhattan. When I see a story like this one, I imagine writers and researchers who either have not or would not care to share the excitement of living on this island; I suppose that we are lucky, here, that more people don’t. What beggars belief is seeing the story printed in the Times, and not in the Styles Section where it belongs, but in the Sunday Review.

Shamus Khan’s essay on “elitists” reads like something sourced by Wikipedia and a content farm, with perhaps some hasty review of university-level history texts. It is hugely wrong on one major point, failing as it does to recognize that audiences for the city’s vibrant classical-music establishment were nurtured more by the public schools, which used to make a much greater use of the city’s artistic resources, than by any socialite philanthropists. (It’s worth noting that those public schools also transported generations of students from low-income backgrounds to six-figure careers — miserable wretches!) Khan falls for a widespread solecism about culture: that it is always “popular” and that people find what they like on their own. This is a picture of the arts in which education has no role — a very convenient premise for conservatives who wish to reduce education to vocational school. Printing such stuff is a disgrace to the Times.

***

By the time I got to the rubbish about conservatives and liberals — no wonder conservatives dislike paying taxes, if they’ve found happiness on $75,000! — I had run out of indignation. I didn’t have to read the piece to be shocked; the byline took care of that. Arthur Brooks is the president of the American Enterprise Institute! To grasp the utlity and reliability of such a person’s remarks on this issue, I ask you to imagine my devoting the rest of this week’s blog entries to the Greatness of Me. I will tell you how super I am, and I will back it up with findings from studies that I have personally conducted. I have never met a happy conservative man in my life. Smug and anxiously sarcastic, yes. Happy, no. (It’s like a bad cologne.) There are many conservative women, right here on this island, who maintain an appearance of happiness, but it depends too much upon disciplined disregard for the happiness of others, not to mention colorists’ fees that would easily gobble up a quarter of that $75,000, to strike me as genuine.  

One thing that the “Happiness” piece got right: Happiness and generosity — open-heartedness — are constant companions.

This Fourth of July, I spent the day reading. All of it. I did not watch the fireworks; I did not leave the apartment. I scarcely left my reading chair.

The book in question — for it was one book — was Wilkie Collins’s No Name, a novel that I’d never heard of when Kathleen found it on the shelves at the London Review Bookshop in May. She read it in one go, mostly on the plane coming home, absolutely unwilling to put it down. It took the book longer to hook med; the First Scene’s idyll cum catastrophe seemed to involve a lot of  stuffy Victorian attitudinizing. But once Magdalen made her escape, and the story got rolling, it carried me along as gleefully as any amusement-park ride.

For sheer fun, the Fourth Scene can’t be beat. Set at Aldborough (Aldeburgh) on the Suffolk coast, it is a high-pitched match — liken it to tennis or to chess as you will — between two wily plotters whose schemes are so fast and furious that they often blow up, or fall completely flat, with the sardonic levity of Mad Magazine’s “Spy vs Spy” feature. Collins is of course the arch-plotter himself, and his shamelessness is exceeded only by his plausibility. You could argue that a novel as entertaining as No Name can’t be a very great one, but I’m not interested in that kind of talk right now. I believe that anyone my age ought to have read a novel three times before getting carried away by greatness.

And in any case what interests me most about the book, quite aside from the fun of it, is its ending, and what I like about the ending may be proof, to some readers, that No Name is not even a very good novel, much less a great one. I’m not sure that I’d have grasped why I found the ending so satisfying if it hadn’t been for editor Mark Ford’s introductory remarks.

Many, however, have found No Name‘s last chapters unsatisfactory. That Magdalen’s brave odyssey should collapse into such a morass of clichés — rescue by a seafaring strong man, a penitential illness and a sickbed conversion — seems a frustrating elision of the many powerful questions the novel has hitherto posed, though to such as Mrs Olyphant, even this dramatic reversion to the ideals of hearth and home was too little too late.

Were we reading the same book? What “deathbed conversion”? I missed that. Nor did I see Magdalen’s illness as “penitential.” But the “rescue by a seafaring strong man,” now, that didn’t strike me as a cliché at all. D’you know why? From the moment that Captain Kirke made his brief appearance in the middle of the novel, I knew that Magdalen was going to end up in his arms, or at least that’s where I wanted her to end up, because without being entirely conscious of what I was going on I did something that lawyers call “incorporation by reference.” Captain Kirke was a reference, whether Collins intended him to be or not, to Jane Austen’s Captain Wentworth, and when things did indeed work out as I’d hoped, the last thirty-odd pages were charged with all the power of Persuasion, an effect greatly intensified by the fact that I hadn’t just read Persuasion.

Let me be very, very clear about one thing: I have no idea of Collins’s influences. I don’t know that he ever read Persuasion. I’m fairly certain that any reminiscence is unintentional; that, in fact, Collins would have cloyed the ending if he had undertaken it as an homage to Austen’s last novel. The simple truth is that both novelists fastened on a type of English hero that, while not overly common, is instantly recognizable. Collins describes the type very well, seeing him through Magdalen’s eyes and thus capturing the particular flavor of the hero-worship:

She sat listening to him with a breathless interest, looking at him with a breathless wonder, as those fearful stories — made doubly vivid by the simple language in which he told them — fell, one by one, from his lips. His noble unconsciousness of his own heroism — the artless modesty with which he described his own acts of dauntless endurance and devoted courage, without an idea that they were anything more than plain acts of duty to which he was bound by the vocation that he followed — raised him to a place in her estimation so high above her, that she became uneasy and impatient until she had pulled down the idol again, which she herself had set up. It was on these occasions that she rigidly exacted from him all those little familiar attentions so precious to women in their intercourse with me.

You can’t imagine Anne Elliot exacting attentions from Captain Wentworth, but then Anne is like Magdalen’s sister, Norah — patient. Magdalen has, in the course of the novel, exhibited plenty of “dauntless endurance” herself, and plenty of courage as well. She deserves more than a happy ending; she deserves an apotheosis, and that’s what she gets in Captain Kirke. An apotheosis is nothing but a cliché seen in an unflattering light by someone in an ungenerous mood.  

***

An even guiltier pleasure is imagining what Anthony Trollope would have made of No Name. Thrown it into the fire, he would have. Magdalen Vanstone, insofar as she is the heroine of a novel who finds happiness in the end, stands as a repudiation of everything that Trollope believed about young ladies. The catechism is set forth in The Small House at Allington, in which Lily Dale plights her troth to an unworthy cad, Adolphus Crosbie, and thereafter refuses to acknowledge that Crosbie’s withdrawal from her life permits her to entertain the affections of the worthy man who really loves her, Johnny Eames. Readers begged Trollope to bring Lily and Johnny together in a later book, but he steadfastly refused to do so, because his belief that a good woman can love only once was an article of personal religion. It was also an article of his artistic practise, and that’s why I had to stop reading Trollope: he was prescribing his romances, not describing them.

When Magdalen Vanstone falls in love with Frank Clare, it’s puzzling, because Magdalen is such a strong girl and Frank is such a wuss. You wonder: is Magdalen going to be the making of this young man? Even if you’re clever, like me, and foresee that Frank’s path will cross Captain Kirke’s (how could they not? they’re both in China; and, yes, that’s a joke of sorts), you don’t know what Collins is going to do with Frank when it comes time to tie up all the knots. In any case, Magdalen outgrows the boy. He behaves badly and she gets over it. Frank’s father writes, at the end, to tell her what has become of his son. “The time when it could have distressed her, was gone by; the scales had long since fallen from her eyes.” Scales don’t exist, somehow, for Trollope, and this makes his love stories awkward, because nobody can ever grow up.

No Trollopean heroine would ever dream of embarking on Magdalen’s vengeful adventure, either. Trollope must have hated the very success of Magdalen’s bold impersonations. Nor could he have believed in rehabilitation for a swindler like Captain Wragge. It is impossible not to imagine Trollope waxing mighty indignant. Presenting a minx and a scoundrel in a warm, favoring light: how awfully immoral he must have found it!

He probably had the sense not to read it.  

***

The question raised by my positive feelings about the ending of No Name is this: what kind of literary criticism am I practising when I “incorporate by reference” the whole of one novel into the body of another, giving the second a kind of experiential credit? By insisting that No Name gave me great pleasure because I was singularly well-reminded of Persuasion? Does my report have any value? Or is it the unhelpful equivalent of saying, “I really liked it!”

I believe that it does have value, that it is extremely important to be candid about the pleasures of fiction, howsoever they derive. I note that Captain Kirke reminded me of Captain Wentworth in a way that I would not see Captain Wentworth’s reminding me of Captain Kirke. Reading Persuasion, I might well be reminded of the example of Captain Kirke, as another “seafaring strong man.” But I would not say that Persuasion is like No Name. This connection runs one way only, and it ought to be clear that the point of my remarks is not, certainly not to propose an equivalence between the two novels. No Name is, one might argue, a lesser novel precisely because Persuasion can be read into it. Nothing can be read into Persuasion, or into any of Jane Austen, except perhaps shreds of Dr Johnson’s cadences. Jane Austen needs no help from me.

But if Wilkie Collins does, if he can use that help — if No Name becomes a more satisfying book if you’ve read (and loved) Persuasion — then I’m happy to give it. I’m happy to help myself, in short. No Name might not be a better novel, but it becomes a more engaging one because of what I bring to it. The matter interests me very much as a function of age. I read, as it were, ensconced on an ever-growing and now rather massive cloud of prior reading. There’s no telling or how it might adapt my reading posture, or what I might reach in and pull out of it.

The idea of evaluating a novel in isolation, judging how well it functions as a self-contained contraption, is by now vieux jeu. We read for pleasure, not for liturgical exercise. In the end, “I really liked it” must be the (unstated) premise of every critical response; “I didn’t like it” ought to warn the writer to stop right there, for nothing that follows will be of any serious interest (however rib-tickling the take-down). If you want to tell the world that you liked something, then you must be as fully honest as you can be, and admit to accidental attractions aong with the high-minded ones. In the case of No Name, I don’t see anything particularly accidental about my being reminded of Persuasion. It can be taken as understood that, at this point, I’ve read all of Jane Austen three or four times at least. (Just as it can be taken as understood that I’m unable to finish Moby-Dick.) And how keen the pleasure, in such a jolly book, to feel the warmth and generosity of a novel so much more austere.  

We’re having a heat wave — and Con Ed is having a lock-out. At least two managers, stepping in to do the rank-and-file work, have been hospitalized for burns. Our fretful neighbor down the hall gobbles on about the risk of being stuck in the elevator during a sudden blackout. “Because,” she goes on, as if to add something, “You don’t want to get stuck in the elevator during a blackout.”

The other day, she had a different kind of lock-out to worry about. Another neighbor’s grandson, not quite a year older than Will so therefore about three and a quarter, locked his mother out of his grandparents’ apartment when she went to the laundry room down the hall to put some clothes in the dryer.

I was coming back from tossing something down the garbage chute when I saw the mother at the door. I thought that she was letting herself in, and I didn’t think anything of asking after her father (our neighbor), who hasn’t been well. I wished that I knew her name; I’ve known her for most of her life. She was just about starting out in elementary school when we moved into this apartment. She and her older brother both married years ago, and they both have sons. The daughter now lives in Astoria, I believe, but she is a frequent visitor, and I always like to see her boy, who is very handsome. He has a Spanish grandmother, and a grandfather from Bombay, and his other grandparents are Japanese. I didn’t realize what he had just done — his mother was, alas, not letting herself in — until one of the building’s handymen swept by with an enormous ring of keys. That’s when our fretful neighbor appeared. ‘Oh, good, someone’s come up!” I myself remained fretful. The last time I locked myself out of the apartment, none of the keys on that ring turned our lock, and I can’t remember how I got back inside. It turned out to be just as fruitless for our neighbor’s daughter. I offered my own key, but it didn’t even  fit the lock on her door.

I wishdrew to our apartment but left the door ajar. I tried to work but could only think of the little boy, confused inside his grandparent’s apartment. Our neighbors’ apartment has a balcony, but it is in the outer corner of the building, and there is no adjacent balcony, so no one could do what one very agile flight attendant did, shortly after we moved into our place, when she locked herself out of the flat next door. Right: she climbed over the railing and stepped along the edge, with her back to the abyss. I wondered how difficult it would be to rappel or otherwise drop down to our neighbors’ balcony from the one above. These hopeless thoughts were obsessive and sickening, and I wasn’t getting any work done.

Then I heard the cheering and the laughter. It seems that the little boy settled down enough to do what his mother told him to do, and unlock the door. Universal applause! But I thought as I went back to work that in my day the child would have been scolded and possibly spanked, with all the love in the world. Parents put a lot more stock in fear in those days than they do now. I like to think that it is a change for the better, and I hope that it is not just pretty to think so.  

***

I spent the afternoon with Ms NOLA yesterday — summer hours! It was too hot to do anything interesting, but we decided that we would fix dinner together and that her beau (M le Beau) would join us, as of course would Kathleen. At first, we contemplated a composed salad, with tomatoes and some delicious piemontese rib eye that I would slice paper-thin. That probably would have made sesnse, given the heat, but we went in the other direction altogether, and prepared a basically Italian meal, with a primo of pasta and a secondo of roast chicken. We cheated on the chicken; we bought herb- and garlic-marinated chicken halves at Fairway. I gave them a try the other day and they weren’t at all bad. I could probably come up with a more interesting marinade myself, but you can’t marinate a chicken at the last minute; it takes hours (and hours). But Ms NOLA goosed it a bit, with cayenne and, at the end, green onions. This was served with sautéd corn tossed with chives.

The pasta sauce was the focus of our invention. The minute we got back from the store, I ran a Vidalia onion through the mandoline and drizzled the slices with olive oil. In the course of two hours, the onion caramlized beautifully and reduced from the bulk of a softball to three or four weightless tablespoons of intense allitude. (Correct me on that; I’m working from allium.) Meanwhile, we dumped a large can of crushed San Marziano tomatoes into a small Dutch oven and seasoned it with white wine and nutmeg; as it bubbled along nicely and slowly, we added more wine. When it was time to put the chicken in the oven, we also slid in a pint of cherry tomatoes, daubed with butter and marjoram, tossed in one of those lion’s-head bowls with a lid.

The sauce was a study in foods cooked for a long time playing well with others that were hardly cooked at all, and the result was a robust summer sauce that made the best of the weather instead of fighting it. While the water boiled for the spaghetti, we combined the slow-cooked elements in the Dutch oven, stirring in roast tomatoes (with their bubbly, buttery cooking liquid) and the caramelized onion into the crushed tomatoes. Then we added a grated zucchini and a lot of garlic. At the last minute, a quantity of chopped parsley was tipped in.  At the table, we passed a bowl of chopped basil, which Kathleen doesn’t care for, and a wedge of organic parmegiano reggiano, along with a grater.

Ms NOLA did almost all the work, seriously, especially the chopping and the grating. She decided when to add what (although she always asked for my opinion first, only to hear that I left it up to her). My one new idea (new to me, that is) — that the grated zucchini would boost the lightness of the sauce while practically melting invisibly into it — turned out to be a good one. The downside of my being spared all that hard, hot prep was that I sat down to table in wide-awake mode, and didn’t shut up the entire evening.

The next morning, I have washed all the dishes and gathered up the linens into the clothes hamper. The empty bottle of Médoc has been carried down to the recycling bin. Ms NOLA took all of the leftovers, at my urging, so there is nothing left of dinner, not even a slice of the scrumptious almond-and-apricot tart — nothing, that is, except the fantastic fragrance of a delicious sauce.

***

I may not have done anything interesting on Friday afternoon, but I did go to Crawford Doyle, which I would classify as disgraceful, given the pile of books, right here in the apartment, that remain to be read. I bought four books, two of of them criminal purchases — redeemed, however, by the curious and unlikely fact that I have read them both as of this writing. I have done nothing else this weekend, but I have read Midnight in Peking, by Paul French, and The Rules of Civility, by Amor Towles. I read the first on Saturday and the second on Sunday, boom boom.

The two justifiable purchases were After a Funeral, one of Diana Athill’s memoirs, and An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace, by Tamar Adler. I’m reading all of Athill, anything I can get my hands on, so I don’t need to excuse that acquisition. An Everlasting Meal has been making a strongly favorable impression upon Ms NOLA, and, having read the wonderful chapter on rice, I can see why; among many other attractions, it is not lost on me that Elizabeth David is one of Adler’s touchstones. In short, it was never going to be the case that these books would get stuck in a pile and make me feel guilty.

But the other two books — pigs in pokes, almost. I’d seen The Rules of Civility, but resisted it, for reasons that I’ll explain when I write it up. What decided me for it was Ms NOLA’s remarking that her mother read it and liked it. A redoubtable recommendation! As for Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China, I’m afraid that I must confess (although I’m brazenly unashamed) that the dust jacket sold me. I can’t at the moment actually read the credits, and applaud the designer; it’s too dark at the moment. But I’ll write it up, too. An immensely exciting read! Both books ought to be adapted for the screen right away!

These two purchases were indefensible because there was no good reason to be sure that I wouldn’t dislike the reading of these books, and give up on them after ten or fiftee pages. It’s bad enough to buy the books by Athill and Adler; I know theat I’ll read them, but where will I put them? In the event, helped, perhaps, by weather that made anything but reading, and reading of an escapist nature, simply horrid, I swallowed both books whole, like two delicious oysters. It felt shockingly wrong to stay planted in my chair, hour after hour, turning the pages — and yet you probably think that that’s how I spend every day! If only!

Interestingly, both stories are about ten years older than I am. Much of Midnight in Peking happens in 1937, and almost all of The Rules of Civility is set, in Manhattan, in 1938. I have always believed that ordinary modern women never looked better than they did in 1939; I only wish that I knew it for an experienced fact. The conviction certainly gave both books a patina of chic.

Two excerpts from the Fourth Scene of No Name, by Wilkie Collins (1862). First, Captain Wragge cons Mrs Lecount into being flattered by his scientific chatter:

Never had Captain Wragge burnt his adulterated incense on the flimsy altar of human vanity to better purpose than he was burning it now.

Of course, it doesn’t take long for Mrs Lecount to wise up.

Mrs Lecount accepted the proposal. She was perfectly well aware that her escort had lost himself on purpose; but that discover exercised no disturbing influence on the smooth amiability of her manner. Her day of reckoning with the captain had not come yet — she merely added the new item to her list, and availed herself of the camp-stool. Captain Wragge stretched himself in a romantic attitude at her feet; and the two determined enemies (grouped like two lovers in a picture) fell into as easy and pleasant a converesation, as if they had been friends of twenty years’ standing.

***

From E H Carr, What Is History?, first published in 1961 and, with regard to the the problem posed by all advertising, as fresh as tomorrow:

Professional advertisers and campaign managers are not primarily concerned with existing facts. They are interested in what the consumer or elector now believes or wants only in so far as this enters into the end-product, ie what the consumer or elector can by skilful handling be induced to believe or want. Moreover, their study of mass pscychology has shown them that the most rapid way to secure acceptance of their views is through an appeal to the irrational element in the make-up of the consumer and elector, so that the picture which confronts us is one in which an élite of professional industrialists or party leaders, through rational processes more highly developed than ever before, strains its ends by understanding and trading on the irrationalism of the masses. The appeal is not primarily to reason; it proceeds in the main by the method which Oscar Wilde described as “hitting below the intellect.” I have somewhat overdrawn the picture lest I should be accused of underestimating the danger. But it is broadly correct, and could easily be applied to other spheres. In ever society, more or less coercive measures are applied by ruling groups to organize and control mass opinion. This method seems worse than some because it constitutes an abuse of reason.

***

Diana Athill, Instead of a Letter (1962): on having some money in one’s pocket after winning a prize.

To me, therefore, five hundred pounds tax-free seemed wealth. I could go to Greece during the coming spring without worrying — I could even travel first-class! I could by a fitted carpet, and new curtains which I really liked, and there would still be money over. During that winter I felt rich, and because I felt it I gave an impression of being it. A little while earlier I had been looking at dresses in a large, smart shop, and when I had pointed to a pretty one and said “I’ll try that,” the girl serving me had answered in a tired voice: “It’s expensive. Why try on something you can’t afford?” In the same shop, wearing the same clothes, soon after I had paid my five hundred pounds into the bank, I was served with such civil alacrity that I could have ordered two grand pianos to be sent home on approval and they would have offered a third. Courteous men spent hours unrolling bolts of material for me, urging me to consider another, and yet another. A pattern for matching? Why, yes! And instead of the strip two inches wide which I was expecting, lengths big enough to make a bedspread were procured for me. For about a month I believe I could have furnished a whole house on credit, not because I was looking different, not because I could, in fact, afford it; simply because, for the first time in my life and for no very solid reason, I was feeling carefree about money. I learnt a great deal about the power of mood during that month.

***

From the third and final part of Colm Tóibín’s second novel, The Heather Blazing (1994), which is in part a bildungsroman about a son of Fianna Fáil.

He could not wait to tell Carmel what he had seen. He thought about when he would see her next as he took a few steps down, and then he realized, as a slow pain went through him, that she was dead, that he would not have a chance to tell her about the scene he had witnessed. This made him understand, more than ever, that he could not face her not being with him, that he had spent the time since she died avoiding the fact of her death. He went down to the sand and sat in the shade. The wind was still strong and blew sand at him. He thought about it: the interval just now when he had blieved that she was alive, that she was back in the house, in the garden maybe, or in the proch, reading the paper, or a novel, and he would come back from his walk or his swim and he would tell her the news. Mike has taken to sitting in the shell of his house, with its walls open to the four winds reading the paper. But, slowly, painfully, it sank in thatthere would be nobody when he went back to the house.

What I never got quite round to saying, the other day, was that I don’t have the time to watch things on television. I really don’t! My days are full. Rather than watch two people have an interesting conversation, I’d prefer to read a transcript; not only can I do that more quickly, but I remember the insights much more precisely. The effort of netting useful information from the wide televisual datastream is a distraction from actual understanding. Also, most of that data is not only irrelevant but tedious.

As for watching television to pass the time, this, I assure you, is a capacity that can be relinquished, and once you let it go, television becomes a maddeningly pesky irritant. It’s raison d’être is to attract attention, for whatever reason. Usually the reason is dubious. One of the great things about iPods and smartphones is that televisions in public waiting rooms are now on the way out. Now we can expect everyone, and not just readers, to come equipped with personalized (and silent) means of passing the time.

I love watching movies at home, but this is not watching television. This is slipping a DVD into a player and watching a self-contained work of cinematic art. I don’t have as much time for it as I’d like; I seem to have less time for it than I used to do. A movie, unlike a TED talk, can be inherently transporting. The movie is not a medium but an end in itself, and the thoughts that watching a good movie inspires are not like the thoughts that one carries away from an enlightening lecture.

So my objection to TED talks in particular and to audiovisual presentations of information generally is two-edged. First, they take too much time. Second — and this is what’s wrong with being transported by a slideshow — they convey an illusory mantle of expertise. The bad thing that you take from a satisfying lecture is the half-conscious sense that you now understand something that you didn’t before. But this is to beggar any meaningful conception of “understanding.” What you learn from a truly good lecture is that you understand very little. If you want to understand more, you’re going to have roll up your sleeves and make a lot of decisions: whom to ask for advice about what to research, how to find out about useful projects that might be able to use your help, or whether you ought to pursue an advanced degree. Chatting agreeably with friends afterward over a glass of wine does not constitute understanding.

Kathleen and I have only one political difference: “Just once,” Kathleen moans, “I’d like to vote for someone I really liked.” I, for my part, can’t imagine such a development — as a matter of principle, anyway. As a matter of fact, I’ve always liked Michael Bloomberg, as mayor. I don’t really care to know him, or any other elected official, any better than that. I believe in impersonal politics! Once, over at the Lexington Candy Shop, Rudolph Giuliani, then a district attorney, walked in to canvass  the joint, and I couldn’t bear him from that moment on. I would be horrified to learn that a friend (or, more likely, a friend’s child) was running for office.

Thinking about the transports into which TED talks propel enthusiastic audiences, I can only imagine the shudder with which the Founders would have responded to the discovery, not yet made in their time, that highly-educated men (and women) of property can be swayed by savvy political appearances. Would it have mitigated or intensified their horror to know that very few people are ever transported across party lines?

***

Whenever I try to think of ways to fix the United States, I always bump up against states, and the preposterous meaningless boundaries with respect to population. History advises me that no one is ever going to redraw those lines. Montana will always be a big emptiness in the middle of nowhere, with two votes in the Senate.

It occurred to me yesterday that we might tackle the problem from the other direction. Create six to ten superstates, each centered on a major metropolitcan area, and give each one a clutch of extra senators. Work out the details and put the proposal into one tidy Constitutional Amendment. See how it goes. Most Americans would see their voting power shoot up, and swing states would be a thing of the past. Along with a lot of other headaches.

Happy Fourth!

The first thing that I read when I got this week’s New Yorker up to the apartment was  Nathan Heller’s “Listen and Learn,” a report on TED. If you don’t know what TED is, I am not going to help you. (Not here. If I ever make more considered use of this entry’s material, I will at least throw in a link.) It just seems that explaining TED in a blog entry, at this moment in time, is much like reminding you to turn on your computer. 

I haven’t watched much in the way of TED talks, partly because the ones that I did see were powerful contributors to my decision to resist all visual aids in the development of my fach. Aside from the photographs that decorate this site, and that have nothing to do with the written contents, perhaps even offering a haven of carefree purposelessness from the sea of memory and interrogation that pours out of me — aside from them, nothing. I’m like The New Yorker itself in the old days: no photographs and few drawings (aside, of course, from the “drawings”). That’s because I believe that visual display is profoundly distracting from the enterprise of sharing and parsing ideas. To grasp an idea, you must close your eyes — close your eyes, that is, in the act commonly known as “reading.” You must, in the course of bringing words to life in your brain, imagine an environment other than the one in which you’re reading. Sometimes it’s fun; often it’s hard work. There is reason to believe that there is a correlation between hard work and real learning. Learning is put to the test by doing. Where ideas are considered, writing is doing. As you’re no doubt aware, writing is even harder work than serious reading.

Watching someone tell an interesting story (which can be about anything in the world) is never going to be hard work. There is only one thing to learn from a TED talk: that you did or did not enjoy yourself while it lasted. As with sex, learning is slightly beside the point.

***

Heller is brilliant about TED.

The TED talk is today a sentimental form. Once, searching for transport, people might have read Charles Dickens, rushed the dance floor, watched the Oscars, biked Mount Tamalpais, put on Rachmaninoff, put on the Smiths, played Frisbee, poured wine until someone started reciting “somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond.” Now there is TED.

Transport. Yes. No thanks.

***

My disaffection with TED talks began long before I ever saw one, back in the mid-early days of The New Yorker Festival. Over three years, I attended ever more events, beginning with one and ending with six. Most of the events were literary in nature — or were billed as such. The first that I attended was a reading Edward T Jones (and was Jonathan Lethem there, too? I don’t remember.) At the last one, John Ashbery read some of his poems. It was at the New York Public Library, shortly before the Ashbery reading, that I came to the end of my Festival line. The hall was packed — not that this was a discomfort — and someone was interviewing Calvin Trillin, who of course was making the audience laugh a lot. (I remember a string of jokes about the “wily and parsimonious Victor Navasky,” then the publisher of The Nation.) Something about the laughter began to put me off. I was as entertained as anyone, but was the search for entertainment what had gotten me out of the house early on a weekend morning? Did I regard Calvin Trillin as an entertainer? No, as it happens, I didn’t, and I don’t. He is a writer — a very amusing one, certainly — whose presence adds little to the zing of his written words.

If I am going to see Calvin Trillin, then I want to meet Calvin Trillin, to sit down and talk with him. I realized two things at the Library. First, much as I enjoyed Trillin’s writing, I did not feel an urge to know him better. Jonathan Franzen — now there’s someone I’d like to talk to. I think. I have always wanted to have a conversation with Sigourney Weaver — about her father, perhaps the most deeply disappointed man in the history of television. (That is my inference, at least. I’d like to hear what she thinks, and what she saw growing up.) I did once have a sensationally fun conversation with Kate Christensen; I was able to tell her that I’d read all her books because my daughter and her first editor were college chums. In the aftermath of Netherland, I’m afraid that Joseph O’Neill might have come to fear that I was stalking him, but he very graciously granted my eccentric request for a signature on page 135 of my copy of his novel. And I cannot deny that bandying a word or two with Colm Tóibín has colored my reading of his work; it most certainly has done, and I’m grateful. I no New Critic, determined to reject any and all information about an artist extrinsic to the artwork itself. Heavens, no! But in each of the foregoing instances (all of them retailed pretty much the next morning, long ago in these pages), there was a personal encounter in which the writer, however forgettably, met me. The exchange was two-way, and we are the only two people who had it. The twinkle of that kind of memory was entirely absent from the experience of watching Calvin Trillin be witty.

***

I completely agree with Sir Ken Robinson’s views on public education. “I think you’d have to conclude that the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors.” Education, as it’s dished out today, almost anywhere, is wasted upon most of its reluctant recipients, and the university professors aren’t going to notice or care. Functionally, public education amounts to little more than day care for older children. A school that provides more than day care, and provides it consistently even to a quarter of its students, is a marvel. I may look up Sir Ken; I’ll certainly look out for signs of his impact on public education. But I am not going to look at his TED talk, which Heller says is “the most-viewed TED talk of all time.” I’m not in need of transport.

***

It appears (see yesterday’s entry) that I am not going the way of Nora Ephron, whatever the state of my platelets. Not yet. I’m slightly abashed about having brought the visit up at all, and I’ll try not to say anything about next week’s (routine) colonoscopy.

Later this morning, I’m due at the doctor’s, to have blood taken. The blood that was taken when I had the infusion of Remicade two weeks ago showed an abnormally low (but just abnormal) platelet count, which could mean, as the rheumatologist put it on the phone, “nothing,” or it could, I surmise, mean that I’m going the way of Nora Ephron. Life is so exciting!

I wonder if anyone one finds it strange that I have not mentioned the Affordable Care Act in these pages, not once, I believe. I am certainly not opposed to its provisions, and I was as pleasantly surprised as anyone by Chief Justice Roberts’s unexpected support for the Act as a tax. But ever since “health care” was very prematurely rushed into Congress for its peculiar brand of intensive care, in the early days of Bill Clinton, it has been so clear to me that charging for health care properly must precede paying for it that I can take no interest in the schemes that have been unrolled over the ensuing two decades. They’re all definitively stupid, in that they attempt to bandage bruises from the knockings of a congeries of medical practices that was never designed to work smoothly or consistently for a large number of patients. On the contrary, it was designed, to the extent that it was designed at all, to provide the executives of large corporations with free health care: a classic example of American socialism for the rich.

But no one seems at all interested in the history of our medical plant. How did it become what it is? I don’t think that arrangements for the equitable payment of doctors’ and hospitals’ bills can be made by people who have never given that question much thought.

The other day, the Times published a recipe for potato salad that caught my eye, David Tanis’s “A Summer Salad the French Might Recognize,” and I thought that, instead of going out for dinner that night, as planned, I would make it to have ready whenever Kathleen got home from work. I insisted upon a few changes, of course, and I conducted an experiment that turned out very nicely. There was also a second experiment, but that one flopped, and the results were discarded before they could ruin the salad.

The big change was to add tuna. I bought the smallest chunk that Agata & Valentina had to offer. I researched methods for poaching it online — much easier than going through my cookery books. In a small saucepan, I brought water and wine to the boil, and then I reduced it to a simmer. It took a while to regain the simmer after I’d slipped the tuna into the water, but in ten minutes it was done. I removed the tuna to a bowl, where I flaked it and drizzled it with olive oil.

Then, in the same water, still simmering, I cooked two eggs, for about nine minutes. Would this be a disaster? Would the eggs develop an odd color or, worse, a funny taste? I wouldn’t know until I put the salad together at the last minute. It turned out that they were just fine.

Then, still in the same simmering water, I cooked a handful of haricots, for just a few minutes. As I’d done with the eggs, I transferred the cooked beans to a bowl of ice water.

Meanwhile, I steamed a bag of assorted heirloom potatoes, most of them quite small. When the largest were tender, I quartered the lot and drizzled them with olive oil as well. This is how I always prepare potatoes for salad. So I missed the thyme and bay called for in the recipe. I’m not sure that they would have added much — muuch that was desirable, I mean. Next time I make this dish, I will buy six or eight small potatoes; I could make a real potato salad with what didn’t go into this one.

By now, all the elements of the salad, except for the dressing, were ready. Dinner was hours away. Heaven!

I had thought from the start that I would compose the dressing by poaching garlic in olive oil. I looked into this online as well, but I’m pretty sure that I came up with a bad recipe. It began with dropping the garlic cloves into boiling water for a few seconds in order to make them easier to peel — an extraordinarily unnecessary step in my book. The poaching time seemed unusually long, especially as the cloves turned an unappealing dirt color. Another bright idea of my own — tossing in a few oil-cured anchovy fillets — made things a little worse. This concoction did not pass the sniff test. I salvaged the anchovies, tossing them into the tuna, and threw the rest away. 

The dressing that I did use was made, more conventionally, by combining safflower oil, the juice of a lemon, mustard, parsley, a dozen-odd capers, and cloves of elephant garlic in a small processor and whizzing them into creaminess. The safflower oil was a most welcome relief after the pong of the boiling olive oil, which had stunk up the flat. I suppose I ought to mention salt and pepper. They were added in small amounts as I went along. To the wine and water, for example. Salt and pepper are very important ingredients, salt especially. But they’re also incredibly personal, and part of being a good cook is knowing how much of them will suit you and the people whom you’re feeding. Don’t pay attention to what anyone else says — except of course when baking. (Baking is chemistry; its recipes are formulas.)

When Kathleen called to say that she was heading home, I began to combine things. The remaining capers went into the tuna bowl, and so did the chives. I halved two dozen pitted niçoise olives and threw them in as well, despite the recipe’s instructions to serve them on the side. Thinking that I had far too many potatoes, I reached in for small handfuls, three in all — about a third of what I’d steamed: this is a salad with potatoes, not a potato salad. (Good to know!) I peeled and quartered the eggs; in future, I think that I shall do what I usually do, which is to crumble the yolks and dice the whites. (Maybe I’ll toss in a third egg, cooked and quartered, just for looks.) The beans went in at the last minute, right before the dressing. Because Kathleen doesn’t care for basil, I omitted it, and didn’t miss it myself. I sprinkled bits and pieces of mesclun greenery onto our plates and then spooned the salad atop it, garnishing with the egg quarters.

We were surprised at how light the salad was; we’d both expected it to be somewhat heavy. What with tuna, potatoes, olives, anchovies, capers, and garlic… But those last three ingredients were brighteners, not darkeners. (The whizzed capers, together with the lemon juice, would have given the salad a positively neon finish without the tuna and the potatoes to anchor them.) It was so much more delicious than we thought it would be that we laughed out loud.

I’ve been deliberately shambolic about presenting my amendments to Mr Tanis’s recipe, because I think it wise to oblige you, if you’re thinking of giving this dish a try, to write it all out ahead of time for yourself. (I’d be most grateful if you’d send me a copy.)

***

On Saturday night, we had dinner at Nice-Matin with a friend from out of town — from out of town now; he and his wife are contemplating a move to Gotham — and we were seated in a tight spot at a table along the wall opposite the windows giving out onto Amsterdam Avenue. (If there is anything “Amsterdam” about Amsterdam Avenue, I have yet to suspect it.) Kathleen and our guest were seated on banquettes, and I had the chair with my back to the room. My back, also, alas, to a table close behind us. At some point before our entrées were served (the place was hopping), I was tapped on the shoulder, and a man’s voice called out, “Hey, big guy, you’re rocking us to sleep here.” My surprise lasted only an instant, but the mortification deepened until I thought that I was going to be unable to breathe. I pulled my chair in and felt my face flush with heat. It was not a pleasant feeling; it contained a lot of anger. Vanity presented a number of alternative ways in which my unwelcome intrusion might have been stopped earlier; it was fairly obvious that I didn’t know that the back of my chair was bouncing against another table. Or perhaps it wasn’t. I’d been the “big guy” in a “tight spot,” something I go to great lengths to avoid but hadn’t, there and then, had the chance to do anything about. Now I had to do something, so I leaned over and whispered to Kathleen that I thought I might have to leave the restaurant, I was so upset. That seemed to do the trick; I felt a little better just for having said it. I felt a lot better when the clown and his girlfriend paid their bill and departed. I was second to none in acknowledging their right to the quiet enjoyment of their dinner. But I’m pretty sure that a sign to Kathleen or our guest, or a word to the waitress, would have managed a less abrasive fix.

At Fairway this afternoon, the presence of a six-pack of Tsing Tao in my groceries occasioned a request for ID. I told the checkout girl that I would rather not buy the beer than prove that I was old enough to buy it; that, in fact, I was insulted by the request. I recalled an earlier round of this nonsense at the Food Emporium, which the bedeviled manager dealt with by instructing the checkout clerks to type in his own birthday. At Fairway, the request was dropped immediately, and I was allowed to buy the beer without showing my driver’s license. All the way home, all I could think of was how deeply gratifying it would be to take a baseball bat to the head of whatever omedhaun dreamed up this totally Stalinist derogation of discretion: no matter how bloody, the battery would entail no loss of brainpower. I think that I was still angry with the good people of Nice-Matin, for pretty thoughtlessly seating me in an impossible situation. I won’t let it happen a second time.

***

I’m in the middle of Colm Tóibín’s second novel, The Heather Blazing, and I’m hooked. It was a hard novel to get into, for a reason wholly extrinsic to the book itself. In alternating chapters, we shift between present and past, between Dublin and the seacoast just north of Wexford — the same terrain, and much of the same autobiographical material, that appears in The Blackwater Lightship, Tóibín’s first “big” book. It’s not the second novel’s fault that I’d read the fourth before, but it did take a while for me to get beyond a sense of theme-and-variations, interesting enough but hardly gripping. Now, though, I’m as taken up by the story of Eamon Redmond as if I’d never read another word of Tóibín. (And the novel that I’m now reminded of is Brooklyn.) The novel addresses a part of me that is usually offline: having grown up Catholic. Having, for example, fasted before Communion, and worried over sins in the confessional. (I was once told by Monsignor Scott that he was thinking of personally seeing to it that I was thrown out of Iona. So much for anonymity.) I remember a certain willingness to get down on my knees and pray aloud, “Turn, then, most gracious advocate, thine eyes of mercy toward us” — the words running together in a sweet ragù of piety. “After this our exile show unto us” — who spoke like that? Nobody. Veneremur cernui!

What I love about Colm Tóibín as a writer is that while he is frequently quite funny in his criticism, he is never funny in his fiction, even in humorous situations. He may fool with people’s private parts, but he never fools with the English language; it is always as beautiful in his hands as a Benediction.

I’ll get to what that has to do with my distaste for James Joyce some other time.

¶ James Baldwin’s letter to his fifteen year-old nephew (also James Baldwin) no longer seems as bitter as it might have done when written; the shock of Baldwin’s message has completely worn away, and we are left with the simple truth of what he says, which is, alas, still with us — check out “stop and frisk” on Google if you have doubts. (Letters of Note)

I said that it was intended that you should perish in the ghetto, perish by never being allowed to go behind the white man’s definitions, by never being allowed to spell your proper name. You have, and many of us have, defeated this intention; and, by a terrible law, a terrible paradox, those innocents who believed that your imprisonment made them safe are losing their grasp of reality. But these men are your brothers—your lost, younger brothers. And if the word integration means anything, this is what it means: that we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it.

¶ Proof that the legal system is seriously broken is offered in a series of entries at Popehat concerning a preposterous lawsuit against The Oatmeal. (Thanks, Megan!)

See, a legal threat like the one Charles Carreon sent — “shut up, delete your criticism of my client, give me $20,000, or I’ll file a federal lawsuit against you” — is unquestionably a form of bullying. It’s a form that’s endorsed by our broken legal system. Charles Carreon doesn’t have to speak the subtext, any more than the local lout has to tell the corner bodega-owner that “protection money” means “pay of we’ll trash your shop.” The message is plain to anyone who is at all familiar with the system, whether by experience or by cultural messages. What Charles Carreon’s letter conveyed was this: “It doesn’t matter if you’re in the right. It doesn’t matter if I’m in the wrong. It doesn’t matter that my client makes money off of traffic generated from its troglodytic users scraping content, and looks the other way with a smirk. It just doesn’t matter. Right often doesn’t prevail in our legal system. When it does, it is often ruinously expensive and unpleasant to secure. And on the way I will humiliate you, delve into private irrelevancies, harass your business associates and family, disrupt your sleep, stomp on your peace of mind, and consume huge precious swaths of your life. And, because the system is so bad at redressing frivolous lawsuits, I’ll get away with it even if I lose — which I won’t for years. Yield — stand and deliver — or suffer.”

Our system privileges Charles Carreon to issue that threat, rather than jailing or flogging him for it.

¶ No less screwed-up, in our view, is the idea that creative work posted on the Internet ought to be available without charge. Maria Bustillos and David Lowery (author of the “Letter to Emily“) discuss the possibility that legal arguments advanced by Lawrence Lessig and others have no foundation in the realities of excellence. (The Awl)

What this really is, is a simple political issue: a labor issue. It should be possible for a working musician to support a household without having to tour twelve months out of the year, just like it should be possible to live modestly on minimum wage (which it ain’t). But because “art” and “artists” are seen in our world less as craftsmen, and more like these special magical unicorns who are “compelled” to “make art” and can live on air, we are taking our eyes off the ball. Let’s agree on the obvious, and figure out how we can all be paid fairly for our work.

¶ Ian Hacking’s introduction to a new edition of Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm-shifting book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, appears at the Los Angeles Review of Books. Hacking notes that Kuhn was hostile to the development of “science studies,” a field of which his book more than any other factor caused explosive expansion. At issue, it seems, was truthiness. “Kuhn cannot take seriously that “there is some one full, objective, true account of nature.” Does this mean that he does not take truth seriously? Not at all.” ¶ Maria Popova’s appreciation of WIB Beveridge’s 1957 guide to The Art of Scientific Investigation suggests that this book ought to be as well-known as Kuhn’s. Beveridge certainly seems to have had an advance line on the Cognitive Revolution. (Brain Pickings)

It is not possible deliberately to create ideas or to control their creation. When a difficulty stimulates the mind, suggested solutions just automatically spring into the consciousness. The variety and quality of the suggestions are functions of how well prepared our mind is by past experience and education pertinent to the particular problem. What we can do deliberately is to prepare our minds in this way, voluntarily direct our thoughts to a certain problem, hold attention on that problem and appraise the various suggestions thrown up by the subconscious mind.

***

¶ Money — the problem with money — will always be with us. The worst of it is that, if money is not an end in itself (it can’t be), where should the pressure to acquire it let up? Robert Skidelsky and his son, Edward Skidelsky, explore the question in an essay, “In Praise of Leisure,” adapted from a forthcoming book. They find authority in that old fun-seeker, Bertrand Russell. (Chron Higher Ed; via Brainiac) 

We cannot expect a society trained in the servile and mechanical uses of time to become one of free men overnight. But we should not doubt that the task is, in principle, possible. Bertrand Russell, in an essay written just two years after Keynes’s effort—a further illustration of the stimulating effects of economic crisis—put the point with his usual clarity:

“It will be said that, while a little leisure is pleasant, men would not know how to fill their days if they had only four hours of work out of the 24. Insofar as this is true in the modern world, it is a condemnation of our civilization; it would not have been true at any earlier period. There was formerly a capacity for lightheartedness and play which has been to some extent inhibited by the cult of efficiency. … The pleasures of urban populations have become mainly passive: seeing cinemas, watching football matches, listening to the radio, and so on. This results from the fact that their active energies are fully taken up with work; if they had more leisure, they would again enjoy pleasures in which they took an active part.”

¶ We can only imagine what Tyler Cowen, with the collapse of public trust at the forefront of his thinking, would make of the Skidelskys’ musings. “Politicians do not have enough trust that voters will reward them for being courageous, if that is the right word, and voters do not have enough trust that the political act is in fact one of courage.” (Marginal Revolution) ¶ Tyler’s observations make it difficult to see how to implement the spending program that Brad DeLong and Barry Eichengreen recommend urgently in their introduction to a new edition of Charles Kindleberger’s The World in Depression 1929-1939 (1973). ¶ It’s probably too late, anyway, suggests Michael Pettis, who asks “Will Globalization Go Bankrupt” at the thrillingly-titled site, Credit Writedowns. “The “Greenspan put” was once again exercised and the market bailed out, but as Hyman Minsky would probably have pointed out had he been alive, this would only ensure that the crisis, when it eventually came, would be worse.” ¶ We’re all going to hell in a handbasket, anyway, argues Chris Hayes in a new book, Twilight of the Elites, excerpted at The Nation. Oligarchy is inevitable!

Michels’s grim conclusion was that it was impossible for any party, no matter its belief system, to bring about democracy in practice. Oligarchy was inevitable. For any kind of institution with a democratic base to consolidate the legitimacy it needs to exist, it must have an organization that delegates tasks. The rank and file will not have the time, energy, wherewithal or inclination to participate in the many, often minute decisions necessary to keep the institution functioning. In fact, effectiveness, Michels argues convincingly, requires that these tasks be delegated to a small group of people with enough power to make decisions of consequence for the entire membership. Over time, this bureaucracy becomes a kind of permanent, full-time cadre of leadership. “Without wishing it,” Michels says, there grows up a great “gulf which divides the leaders from the masses.” The leaders now control the tools with which to manipulate the opinion of the masses and subvert the organization’s democratic process. “Thus the leaders, who were at first no more than the executive organs of the collective, will soon emancipate themselves from the mass and become independent of its control.”

All this flows inexorably from the nature of organization itself, Michels concludes, and he calls it “The Iron Law of Oligarchy”: “It is organization which gives birth to the dominion of the elected over the electors, of the mandataries over the mandators, of the delegates over the delegators. Who says organization says oligarchy.”

¶ So now we know why zombies are so big right now. But, argues Kristin Rawls at AlterNet (via The Millions),

It’s not zombies we have to fear. It’s the pervasiveness of the belief that extreme disparity is the natural state of things. It’s alarming that these attitudes persist without question or analysis amid media circuses that offer nothing but spectacle.

Zombies promise certain doom that we cannot possibly defeat. The promise of impending self-destruction, by contrast, offers us a shred of agency – that is, the slight possibility that we can fix this. And however small or unsatisfying this reminder may be, we can at least remember that we have a little more hope than, say, the characters who appear in “The Walking Dead.”

¶ Not so fast with the badmouthing of “media circuses”! The Wire star Wendell Pierce is using his ill-gotten (?) gains to irrigate food deserts in his native New Orleans. (GOOD)

***

¶ The most moving aspect of Jeremy Mesiano-Crookston’s collective interview with a handful of Trappist monks is the preoccupation with sin as an everyday, low-grade distraction from what’s important. It is quite as though these men have set up in a Colonial Williamsburg of the mind, one which catechism-defined souls still fall away from God. (The Awl). ¶ Richard Ford finds that, in Canada — the country, not his new novel — he feels released from “this fierce sense of American exigence.” (Guardian; via The Millions) ¶ At The Age of Uncertainty, Steerforth is careful to point out that, having grown up at Richmond, he is not a true Londoner. (We had the same feeling about growing up in Westchester.) But he highly recommends Craig Taylor’s collection of interviews with 200 Londoners.

¶ Felix Salmon goes straight to the heart of what’s useful about blogging (and what’s not) in his appraisal of the Jonah Lehrer kerfuffle. As Felix points out, you can be charged with plagiarizing yourself — repeating yourself is, in certain contexts (scientific ones, especially) tantamount to misrepresenting what you’re saying as new. So, instead of offering fascinating (but occasionally repetitive) magazine articles in blog format, Jonah ought to use Frontal Cortex as a notebook, for sketching ideas, noting links, and responding to commentary. Hard to put into practise, but a beacon to steer toward. ¶ In another vein altogether, Brian Platzer decides to put Imagine to the test, and faute de mieux pursues creativity with the aid of Dewar’s, and also with Red Bull and No-Doze, all in an attempt to resolve his desire to move to California. “My wife hugged me and called me an idiot in the way I liked.” I guess they’re staying in New York. (The Rumpus) ¶ Not surprisingly, David Edwards finds the atmosphere at a monastery/resort near Bordeaux more conducive to creativity. Who wouldn’t? Reading about “Le Laboratoire: a place where ideas could be born, evolve, and be “exhibited” to the public for feedback” had us reaching for the plonck. (GOOD)

¶ Satoshi Kanazawa believes that “less intelligent people are better at doing most things.” We hate to say it, but this sounds like a perfectly Japanese idea, as does the notion that extra intelligence is associated with other kinds of deviance. “Intelligent people are more likely to be nocturnal because humans are designed to wake up when the sun comes up and go to sleep when the sun goes down.” (Prospero; via Arts Journal) ¶ Is Felix Salmon saying something of the same when he cautions against the use of models as weak but plausible as the Gaussian copula? Probably not; possibly the very opposite. “Every bank has graybeards who love to talk about how tools like Gaussian copula functions or value-at-risk are massively inadequate. Those graybeards get a lot of lip-service.” ¶ One thing seems settled: male morality takes a nosedive when masculine appearances are at stake. “Nonetheless, these findings suggest that if ethical standards are a significant factor in your choice of financial advisors or real estate agents, it may be safer to go with Bernadette than with Bernie.” (Scientific American; via 3 Quarks Daily)

¶ Doubtless because we’re reading nothing but English fiction these days, and not recent English fiction at that, there appeared very little of interest on the books front during June. Culpa nostra. There was Tim Parks’s incredibly interesting “Found in Translation,” at the NYRB, about the extent to which Anglophone (especially American) fiction is consumed in translation by European readers with a strong background in English. (via Paperpools) ¶ At the Guardian, Greg Dyer manages to put a lid on the snark for a review of Jonathan Franzen’s new collection, Farther Away:

Franzen doesn’t engage with Tolstoy and Flaubert because he figures (I figure) that they can look after themselves. He prefers to deploy his power as a lobbyist, “a pleader on behalf of yet another underappreciated writer”. (In the case of Munro, Franzen seems somewhat to overstate the extent of her underappreciation.) No binoculars are needed to see the overlap between this kind of literary activism and his dedication to bird-watching and protection (the subject of the two longest pieces in the book). He’s pledged to the protection of endangered species of writers whose books are rarely but eagerly sighted in secondhand shops.

¶ And, at The New Yorker, Mark O’Connell brings out the tender subtext of How to Sharpen Pencils: “The idea of a broken pencil tip bringing into focus all the unhappiness of a person’s life is, on one level, a richly comic one, but on another level—and particularly when you realize that Rees started writing this book in the aftermath of the breakup of his marriage—it’s a quietly poignant one.” (via 3 Quarks Daily) 

¶ Jim Emerson’s Scanners is one of the best sites going for criticism of any kind — for the purpose and practise of criticism. Mention has already been made of his lord-‘a’-mercy response to a “discussion” of film criticism between two Times staffers. Other great June entries included his respects for Andrew Sarris (noteworthy for generous quotes from the late critic) and a “non-review” of Moonrise Kingdom that changed our mind about going. (“Friendships are shared fantasies, conspiracies of affection and loyalties and imagination. So is love. And marriage. And family. And a scout troop. And a profession.”)

¶ Ela Bittencourt wraps up her remarks on Cindy Sherman with a compelling observation. (The House Next Door)

Finally, there’s the importance of the masks themselves; on film, but also in life, we are what we make ourselves out to be. The mask isn’t arbitrary. Through her many guises, Sherman demands that we look at it not as a wanton distraction or whimsy, or solely as a social convention, but as essence, asking how each particular mask is constructed, and what function it serves. In an inversion of the common understanding of the term, Sherman’s masks expose rather than conceal.

¶ The former V X Sterne is back at Outer Life, now nameless as well as anonymous. He is also wife-less, and, if we’re very lucky, we’ll get to see him build his new life insight by insight. “I fear that much of my life is, indeed, a lowest common denominator life, as so much of what I do is automatic and easy, most likely because I race through life so fast there’s no time to think.” That’s healthy fear to have. ¶ Jim Behrle concludes that there must be a God because, frankly, the world is just too weird to have happened by accident. ” Tapestries don’t lie, people! And there are lots of dragons on all kinds of tapestries. So dragons existed!” (The Awl) ¶ R P Bentall proposes to classify happness as a psychiatric disorder. “More importantly, the argument that happiness be excluded from future classifications of mental disorder merely on the grounds that it is not negatively valued carries the implication that value judgments should determine our approacah to psychiatric classification. Such a suggestion is clearly inimical to the spirit of psychopathology considered as a natural science.” (Journal of Medical Ethics; via Discover) ¶ The Awl has been running a series of pieces under the heading “Bad Influences.” We particularly liked Josh Fruhlinger’s contribution, “Giving Bad Advice to Kings.” ¶ We had great fun reading Brent Cox’s totally unscientific survey of bridesmaids and their dresses. “As for wearing it again, I would fish clothes from a foetid river before wearing that dress again.” (The Awl)

Have a Look: ¶ Seymour Chwast: Get Dressed @ Brain Pickings.  ¶ Elizabeth in Pantone. (via The Millions) ¶ 10 Best Decorative Arts History Books @ Design Sponge. ¶ Scout in the Keys: Vizcaya and the Dry Tortugas. (Scouting NY)

Noted: A new address for Mnémoglyphes. ¶ Susan Cheever @ Days of Yore. ¶ Postcards and Borges’s “Aleph.” (The Millions). ¶ Ted Wilsonreviews Facebook; runs for President. (The Rumpus) ¶ The Queen’s English Society gives up. (Guardian; via Arts Journal) ¶ June faves @ Brain Pickings: What makes the I Ching different; What is art? ¶ Bill Murray on avocados. (Esquire; via kottke.org)

The other day or so ago, Kathleen and I were laughing about PT Barnum’s famous bamboozlement, “This Way to the Egress.” Unsuspecting patrons would follow the arrow, only to find that they had left via the exits, and would have to pay anew to re-enter.  We were wondering just how obscure the word “egress” was at the time. I decided to have a look at the OED and, what d’you know, but “egress” must have been something of a shibboleth in the Nineteenth Century, when every educated Anglophone read Paradise Lost, at least far enough to encounter Satan’s great exhortation in Book II.

O Progeny of Heav’n, Empyreal Thrones,
With reason hath deep silence and demurr
Seis’d us, though undismaid: long is the way
And hard, that out of Hell leads up to Light;
Our prison strong, this huge convex of Fire,
Outrageous to devour, immures us round
Ninefold, and gates of burning Adamant
Barr’d over us prohibit all egress. (ii, 437)
This past, if any pass, the void profound
Of unessential Night receives him next
Wide gaping, and with utter loss of being…

The word, while never common, cannot have been unknown. The fact that Satan, hero of the epic, utters it is all I need to know to conclude that Barnum could expect to have legal opinion entirely on his side. Ignorance of Milton is no excuse!

***

From “Spry Old Character,” by Elizabeth Taylor (1953).

Later, the wind drove gusts of fair-music up the hill. Miss Arbuthnot complained; but Harry could not hear it. Missing so much that the others heard was an added worry to him lately, for to lose hearing as well would finish him as a person, and leave him at the mercy of his own thoughts, which had always bored him. His tongue did his thinking for hiim: other people’s talk struck words from him like a light from a match; his phrases were quick and ready-made and soon forgotten, but he feared a silence and they filled it.

I was struck by the idea of finding one’s own thoughts boring. And yet who am I to sniff, who carry something to read wherever I go?

***

From Colm Tóibín’s review of three books about Thomas Mann, collected in Love in a Dark Time (p 118).

Ronald Hayman and Donald Prater are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to Anthony Heibut’s Hamlet. They are dull and worthy and useful perhaps, and they repeat the same facts and the same narrative. Their desire for Mann to be a better person is almost comic. Heilbut has clearly been to Wittenberg, he can be brilliantly perceptive about Mann’s books, he can put on an antic disposition, he can lose himself in long soliloquies about Mann’s sexuality and his work…

…Prater then adds in parenthesis: “The supreme egoism here is as remarkable as the blinkered application to his work.” Mann is sixty-four, his whole world has been destroyed. He has the reaction any normal writer might have during a crisis: he wants to get on with his work; and like everyone else, he is worried about what the war will mean for him. Prater seems to want him to join the Red Cross and spend his morning helping old ladies cross the street rather than working on Lotte in Weimar.

Taking a walk after lunch the other day, I was arrested by a forgotten but instantly familiar sight: a truck painted orange and emblazoned with the Auer’s logo. Not surprisingly, the truck was parked along Gracie Square (the last block of East 84th Street, between East End Avenue and the East River); the firm speicalizes in upscale moving.

Two houses down Hathaway Road from our first house in Bronxville (Eastchester really), in a much prettier little house (Nº 23, if you want to stroll along in street view; we were at 29), lived the Auers, Mr and Mrs, an elderly couple. I would guess that Mr Auer was the founder, or co-founder, of what is still the family business; by 1955, when we moved to Hathaway Road, he was retired, and the moving company was run by his son — I am also surmising. I so surmise because of the occasional appearance of the Auers’ grandson, known as GJ. I suppose GJ came to spend the odd week with his grandparents, perhaps because his parents still lived in the city — probably not far from where I’ve been living all this time. GJ was a bit older than I was, and taller and leaner, as I remember, and very lively; and I remember getting into trouble for doing something with him. I was about eight years old at the time, and the world of forbidden things was immense, but doing anything at all with GJ would probably have been enough. The Auers were “from the city.” This was not a class problem but a “ways” problem. Our ways were not their ways.

My mother’s fear and loathing of New York was one of the differences between us that I never understood while she was alive. That’s to say that I didn’t see it. When she complained about the city, I imagined that, if whatever she was complaining about were fixed, then she would stop complaining and start enjoying the place, because how could you not? She could not. Her childhood was spent in Wilmette, a suburb of Chicago comparable to Bronxville in many superficial ways, but ultimately quite incomparable because of the difference, not really measurable to my mind, between Chicago and New York. You hear a lot of talk about New York versus LA (or you used to do), but LA is just another Long Island sprawl populated by thinning ranks of overlooked locals by the vacationers from New York. New York and Chicago are the American antitheses, or would be, if New York were really American. Chicago is really American.

My mother eventually found happiness in Houston. Even then, I didn’t see her fear and loathing of New York for what it was. I was confused by her readiness to jump on one of the company planes at the drop of a hat for a jaunt to the Big Apple. I didn’t understand that she liked going because what she liked even better was coming back, and coming back loaded with goodies. Kron’s chocolate — that was a big deal for a while. Tortellini were another. My mother had a dish of them at Barbetta (natch) and “found out” where to buy them “wholesale.” I wasn’t paying a lot of attention by this time, so I can’t say from memory how many dozens of boxes she flew down to Houston, but I’m sure that the number was exaggerated.

My mother loved visiting New York. But she hated living anywhere near it.

***

My father, I think, was indifferent to New York. It didn’t bother him. He was where he was. Until he felt that his game was falling apart, he liked best being on a golf course. I didn’t understand this, either, but that’s another matter. My father’s fears and loathings remained unknown to me. He seemed naturally confident always — a fine Midwestern bluff. There was one exception, in the last years at the Hathaway Road house, when as part of his job he began to have to address the security analysts on an annual basis. Did what I just say mean anything to you? It sounds Egyptian even to me. Security analysts? Who were they? How to describe them in today’s terms? I must ask Fossil Darling. In any case, I expect that my father was addressing the New York Society of Security Analysts (they seem to be CFAs now). Not a natural public speaker, at least in his own mind, my father rehearsed his speeches by delivering them into a microphone attached to a cassette recorder (new at the time, and “cheap.”) He stood at the tall dresser in his bedroom and pretended that it was a lectern.

My memory of these rehearsals is corrupt and contradictory. Did I ever try to listen to one of the speeches all the way through? If I did, I wasn’t allowed to do it again — or would I have wanted to? I had no idea what my father was talking about, except that in some extremely obscure way he was making a sales pitch. He was touting the stock of the company for which he worked — but of course I wouldn’t have known to put it that way then. But it was the one time that I actually watched my father work. So this was what he did! Well, it was something. Everything else that he did was done in an office in the city, to which he was not unhappy about commuting every day, invisible and impalpable.

(He was very fond of telling a story about his father-in-law, who, after the War, decided to cut down on commuting time and get to work earlier by moving into the city. He took at an apartment in Sutton Place shortly before I was adopted. After two years or so, he gave it up and moved back to Bronxville. It turned out that he was spending the commuting time by sleeping late and lounging over breakfast. I don’t think that he cared for the city much, either. I think that my father liked this story because it cautioned him against suggesting anything of the same to my mother.)

I remember asking my father what a sinking fund was. It wasn’t what I wanted it to be, and it still isn’t.   

 

We don’t have the word. In French, formation can mean “training.” Déformation professionelle is therefore a clever description of the ways in which a profession, especially an inward-looking one, can warp an exponent’s outlook. I’ve been inspired to take the idea a step further, to suggest that an élite can fall into the trap of mis-training its cadets, going in as it were. Instead of teaching them what they’ll need to know, it teaches them — something else. Something like Latin, Greek, and rugby. That the thesis behind Kwasi Kwarteng’s intriguing examination of six colonial muddles, Ghosts of Empire: Britain’s Legacies in the Modern Age. Even today, Iraq, Kashmir, Burma, Sudan and Nigeria all bear the unhealed wounds of imperial interference and mismanagement (the sixth case, Hong Kong, makes a wickedly ironic contrast). Another thing that they have in common is the overwhelmingly public-school background of the Englishmen responsible. Kwarteng is not wrong to see a connection.

Instead of developing an overarching imperial policy and making sure that it was implemented, Whitehall relied on the holders of a narrowly-defined set of credentials to run the Empire. Anyone capable of surviving the rigors of the great public schools and of earning a decent degree at Oxford or Cambridge — and especially anyone who could add to these achievements the glory of a “blue” — was deemed the best candidate for an administrative position, and administrators were vested with vast discretion. Kwarteng talks of “individualism,” and that may be appropriate in a British context, but, as an American, what I see is widespread uniformity of outlook coupled with a rather naive faith in “initiative.” To complete an education that was at least as demanding athletically (and socially, as in “team spirit”) as it was academically was regarded as proof of all-purpose good judgment. And why not? The British Empire did not include England itself. Nor did it include the Anglophone Dominions that were established in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand with a view to avoiding further mutinies on the American model. The British Empire included only lands inhabited by human beings thought to be ineffably inferior to the cream of civilized manhood skimmed from England’s venerable schools. Anyone from that class of gentleman was surely entitled to govern the rest of the world.

The frequent reversals in local policy that Kwarteng laments — the most ruinous, probably, was effected in Sudan, where a “Southern Policy” was reversed after sixteen years of thorough implementation — resulted not from an excess of individuality in imperial staff but from the accidents of personal outlook (which may be what Kwarteng means by “individuality”). One man might be attracted to Islam, and another hate it; neither disposition would be the result of their studiedly aloof schooling. Such differences appear to have been regarded almost as hobbies, as innocent and inconsequential eccentricities. But such was the power vested in imperial administrators that slight irregularities in the overall uniformity of their background could produce sharp contrasts. In Hong Kong, a governor capable of speaking several dialects of Chinese was succeeded by one who could manage no more than “the easy parts of a newspaper.” Any genuine individualists, it seems to me, would have been weeded out in the vetting process.  

Kwarteng’s conclusion about Hong Kong encapsulates the whole book.

Hong Kong’s history goes to the heart of the nature of the British Empire. In reversion to China under a regime of “benign authoritarianism,” the term Chris Patten used to describe British rule, shows a remarkable continuity. Hierarchy, defence, government by elite administrators, united by education in the same institutions, in largely the same subjects, were all features of British imperial rule which were also characteritic of officials in imperial China. The story of Hong Kong also confirms the enormous power wielded by colonial governors. If Sir Mark Young had been succeeded by administrators who shared his vision, the history of Hong Kong might well have been very different. Lastly, Hong Kong showed, in many ways, how changes in Britain were not reflected by changes in the wider empire. Patten was a child of the liberal 1960s and blindly believed a version of his country’s history that presented the British Empire as an enlightened liberal force, spreading democracy and freedom to the furthese shores of the earth. Margaret Thatcher had grown up through the Second World War, listening to, and believing, Churchill’s late Victorian rhetoric that invoked Shakespeare’s “sceptered isle” imagery; she genuinely shared the Whiggish notion that British history, with its Magna Carta and Glorious Revolution, was the story of the development of “freedom” and liberal democratic ideas of government. So far as this idea was true for Britain, it did not apply to any real extent to the administration of the British Empire, which was always a wholly different political organization from Britain itself. The British Empire had nothing to do with liberal democracy and, particularly in Hong Kong, was administered along lines closer to the ideals of Confucius than to the vivid, impssioned rhetoric of Sir Winston Churchill, or even Shakespeare.

I harp on “individualism” not because I disagree with Kwarteng’s thesis — I don’t — but because I believe that there are lessons in Ghosts of Empire that Americans need to learn, and that “individualism” will get in the way of the learning. Not only does a preponderance of leading business executives share advanced degrees from a handful of elite institutions, but the training provided by these schools is itself blinkered by elitism — by the conviction that their faculties know best what they ought to teach. As a result, few professors at our great law and business schools have anything like the practical experience that we insist upon for doctors and engineers. (Many of the former, I would venture, have never spent any significant time outside the academy.)

We learned long ago, from A Jewel in the Crown, that the Empire provided an exalted way of life to Englishmen and -women of unremarkable middle-class backgrounds. Kwasi Kwarteng shows that it also provided an outlet for their autocratic impulses. Perhaps the empire came to be seen as a perversion of British life precisely because it filtered out upstarts and grandees from the sceptered isle.

***

TK

Last week, Felix Salmon published an essay about the Jonah Lehrer kerfuffle — which I haven’t followed. This gist of it seems to be that Jonah is “guilty” of (self-) plagiarism, by virtue of repeating himself at The Frontal Cortex. Felix’s suggestion is to treat the blog, whether as author or as reader, as a notebook. It ought to record the blogger’s thoughts on his reading; it ought to link to online material wherever possible, and it ought to engage with comments and blog entries elsewhere that its entries have inspired.

Wonderful advice, and, oh! how I’m going to try to follow it. But I already know how difficult it is. How difficult, that is, to override the impulse to compose — to think of — entries as essays, or, at a minimum, as carefully-written letters to attentive correspondents. I’d like nothing better than to pile up my daily observations on this and that, but the effort of making them coherent to myself a week later would paralyze me with unrealistic obligations.

As to linking and following comments, this is far from convenient, even at this stage of the blogging project. Perhaps it is difficult for me, because of my age and the self-conscious nature of my endeavors here. (Not that they feel self-conscious to me.) I can imagine a number of technological advances that are unaccountably not being made, but then it’s very likely that I’m a market of one. I was thinking, over the weekend, how handy it would be to dictate into my smartphone throughout the day. When I sat down to prepare an entry, the words would meet me on the screen, already laid out more or less comprehensibly, and a little light editing would finish them for blogging purposes. (A podcast might also be generated as a byproduct, again automatically.) This would spare my writing energy, the time that I spend composing sentences and paragraphs and, yes, essays for the Web site writing that I never seem to get round to. It is maddening that this facility is not to hand.

Nevertheless, I shall renew the effort.

***

One problem that I have never solved is the matter of when a daily entry ought to be written. At the moment, I am writing entries the day before publication, so that I can begin the day without any distracting urgency. It also allows me to add to the entry as the day goes on, before anyone has seen the whole; it is only at the weekends that I’m willing to ask readers to look at an entry a second or third time, to see if I’ve added anything (how conceited this sounds!). What I do on the weekends is an uneasy, but to date the most agreeable, compromise between my desire to present fresh material every day and my need to have a life, especially on weekends.

***

I seem to be reading a dozen books all at once. Out of the blue, madly seeking a slim volume that I might carry along to babysitting the other night, I grabbed the latest edition of E H Carr’s very important 1961 lectures, What Is History? I’ve had the book for a few years now, on the recommendation of I forget whom; I feel awfully stupid for not having read it sooner. In the first two lectures, Carr deals with the problem of “historical facts” — what are they? — and sensibly concludes that they are facts that have become interesting to historians.

The layman imagines, as indeed the early nineteenth-historians believed, that the historian unearths facts from archives, more or less as a matter of looking things up, but anyone with a real interest in the subject knows that this is barely the beginning. One of the most curious books in my library is Eleanor Shipley Duckett’s Death and Life in the Tenth Century (Ann Arbor; 1967, 1988), a very readable account of the pivotal century in European history. Readable, yes; reliable, no. Duckett simply copies out monastic annals, and takes every document at face value. As a convenient account of the surviving writings of the time, Death and Life is probably invaluable, but it is not what we mean by history. I should venture that the number of historical facts pertaining to Europe in the Tenth Century is frightfully small.

As an example of the larval historical fact, Carr mentions the demise in 1850 of a ginger-bread vendor, kicked to death by a mob, at a place called Stalybridge. This event has, Carr notes, been picked up and examined by a colleague, Kitson Clark. Whether or not it becomes a historical fact is entirely a matter of other historians’ agreeing with Clark that it is noteworthy. (On the strength of the Wikipedia entry for Stalybridge — later swallowed up by Manchester — it appears not to have done so, for what that’s worth.)

The second lecture, “Society and the Individual,” thrashes out conundrums that are still being thrashed out today — one wonders what is keeping them alive. Like “nature” versus “nurture,” the distinction between society and the individual is profoundly bogus; there are no individuals acting apart from and outside society, and there are no inchoate “vast, impersonal forces” driving society. Anonymous, perhaps, but not impersonal. Is it difficult for many people to bear these fatally simple-sounding dichotomies in the reciprocity that makes sense of them?

Carr is a very good writer, and must have been an entertaining speaker. The odd thing about his little book is that we still need it.

***

In the late afternoon, three boxes of books arrived, almost all of them from across the sea. Many were purchased at the instigation of Diana Athill, so let’s blame her. How else would I have heard of Timothy Mo, whose An Insular Possession promises to be a good read about Hong Kong. Gitta Sereny I mentioned yesterday; today she appeared. Also, Tessa Hadley’s The London Train, which I mean to read in light of Elizabeth Taylor’s fiction. Kathleen had asked for some one-volume histories of England, and I seem to have covered the range; last week, the Oxford History of Britain, edited by Kenneth Morgan, arrived in its imposing thickness (the British do thick paperbacks so much better than we do), while, today, Simon Jenkins’s very pretty (and pretty insubstantial A Short History of England came in. You might think that I’d have had a good history of England on the shelves, but I was much too cool for that; I required volumes on reigns and epochs. The Oxford is a collection of ten chapters, each written by a different historian, running from 55 BC to the present. Until a few minutes ago, I was lost in Paul Langford’s discussion of Walpole.

Also, and this from Alibris, Robert Liddell’s The Last Enchantments.

Is it me, or is it the newspaper? Some days — most days — there’s nothing much worth reading; the headlines and lead sentences serve to reinforce my awareness of issues and personalities, but provoke no commentary. Every once in a while, though, the Times seems to burst with good stories. Now I think of it, this is most likely to happen on a Sunday.

There were five good pieces in yesterday’s Times. There was the Gitta Sereny obituary, more interesting than it might have been, perhaps, because I was just reading Diana Athill’s memoir of working with Sereny on the publication of her first big book, Into That Darkness, about the conscience of a Holocaust functionary. In the final paragraphs, Sereny’s “secret” — the power that enabled her to stare into “that darkness” — was revealed.

“I know this is difficult to believe, but I’m really, in the old sense of the word, quite a gay person,” she told the newspaper The Scotsman in 2000. “I’m very optimistic. About the world. About people. I believe the majority of people are good.”

Though Ms. Sereny chose to spend her professional life steeped in evil, she said that her calling had little effect on her own temperament.

I’ve got a copy of Into That Darkness on order. 

Then there was Ken Johnson’s essay on LeRoy Neiman. Why, or in what way, was Neiman a “bad artist”? What does that mean? And how come the art world has no widely-respected figures comparable to Wes Anderson in film and Richard Ford in literature? Johnson puts his finger on it: “But there was nothing in his work to upset the couch potato’s televisual worldview.” But why is it important for fine artists to disturb viewers? Contemporary art has a commitment to discomfort that I expect will be seen as somewhat perverse by future generations, much like the Mannerist penchant for masculine bodies with notional female breasts. I don’t care much for LeRoy Neiman’s subject matter, but (much to my shame) I consistently found his pictures exhilarating.   

***

The long story about Sandy Springs, Georgia, couldn’t have been more timely — for me. I’ve made an almost everyday habit of querying the business organizations around me and asking, why can’t they be not-for-profit? In what way do investors improve the way a given operation runs? Well, they’re the source of cash, obviously, but what do they contribute beyond that? Not much that I can see. A one-time grant might serve just as well. The grant might come from the government, or it might come from a philanthropist, but, either way, the undertaking — an apartment house, a movie theatre, a dry-cleaner, a grocery store — could thereupon go about its business without any distractions from its core objectives of providing services at prices that brought in sustaining revenues. There would be no need to grow. The original grant might be repaid over time, like bond debt, and then retired forever.

The same goes for many “governmental” functions, and the Sandy Springs story underlines the other improvement that I have in mind, which is that business operations — especially those the provide fundamental services such as power and water supply and waste disposal — ought to be run by people who have been educated to run them. The outfits that provide Sandy Springs with its outsourced services may or may not be any good at what they’re doing; I’m not as willing as Georgians are to trust the free market to maintain quality. I don’t like those pesky investors lurking in the background, with their itch to maximize profits. And I don’t know anything about the people who are doing the work. How have they been trained? The more I consider the matter, the more clearly I see the enormously stabilizing insitution most hated by modern economics: the guild. The more attractive price-fixing becomes.

In any case, you can see that I did not draw the usual conclusions from the Sandy Springs story.

***

I even read Thomas Friedman’s column, something that I never do. “The Rise of Popularism” is, for the most part, the usual huffenpuff about abstractions. Friedman doesn’t even run with the story that ought to have popped out at him when he typed the words, “generational shift.” That’s probably because, as one of the Baby Boomers whose wastrel ways he decries, he doesn’t care to consider generational shifts that might succeed him. Instead of lamenting the absence of truth-telling leaders in his own generation, he ought to have exhorted those who have grown up with all the new modcons, those who have never known a world without keyboards, screens, and touchpads, to consider the practical merits of candor and honesty in a deeply connected world.

***

Finally: Tek Young Lin, a highly-esteemed, retired English teacher and cross-country coach at Horace Mann, about whom “whispers” arose in the wake of the newspaper’s recent account of long-ago sexual predation at the school. “In those days, it was very spontaneous and casual, and it did not seem really wrong,” Mr Lin now remarks. Breathtaking, no? No denial, no regret. It appears that Mr Lin never forced himself on any student (whatever that means), and that while at least one student may have been scarred by his preliminary advances, no one who consented to have sex with him (if we can allow that to be said for the moment) regretted it. These factors purify the object lesson, because even without the abuse of power that’s surely the most revolting feature of sexual predation, Mr Lin’s conduct remains objectionable.

“In those days,” of course, any kind of homosexual contact was very wrong indeed, by most accounts. It can only have seemed otherwise in the elite atmosphere that Mr Lin breathed — an atmosphere that would shortly bring about a revolution in our judgments about other people’s carnality. A great many things that were forbidden then are tolerated now, and not just tolerated, but formally overlooked, as of no account. But one taboo has taken clear and definite shape, as if drawing into itself all the power shed by abandoned proscriptions. That is the ban on pedophile sex, a ban that takes on an even sharper point where those charged with the upbringing of children violate it.

Tek Young Lin is no longer one of those so charaged; he has been retired for over twenty-five years. It seems that he won’t be prosecuted for his “indiscretions,” and I’m comfortable with that, because the gift of Mr Lin’s story is the insight that it gives into the nature of history itself, and of how things change. What he did was never all right, but the nature of its being not all right has changed. The only thing that would have improved the irony of the story would have been Mr Lin’s teaching history.

Kathleen flew out to Chicago yesterday, for a firm outing, so I decided to have a spa day. The spa was in the bedroom and the rejuvenating device was the DVD player. I watched the last episode of Lewis, Season Six, and then The International, Tom Tykwer’s action thriller about banking. The spa treatment didn’t begin, though, until I went down to collect the mail, and picked up a box from Amazuke: videos featuring British comedienne Miranda Hart.

I hadn’t heard of Miranda until last week, when the head nurse at the Infusion Therapy Unit told me about her. Back at home, checking things out online, I discovered that Patricia Hodge is in the Miranda show, and that clinched it. I’ve adored Patricia Hodge ever since I saw Betrayal, with Jeremy Irons, even though the movie is now much too sad for me to bear watching. I ordered a couple of things, and some of them arrived yesterday. I had not planned to waste the entire day on videos, but mining a new vein of British humour could hardly be dismissed as “waste.” I ended up laughing my head off.

Miranda is an extremely traditional sitcom; I want to call it venerable. It’s got all the staples — irritating mother, pathetic dreams of glory, even more pathetic humiliations, drag (improbably but quite amusingly), and breathtaking rudeness. I’m probably leaving a few things out; my point is that Miranda is funny not because it’s completely new and different but because, like a great performance of a Haydn string quartet, it makes everything new. It is, above all, physical comedy, to a degree rarely seen in connection with a comedy character’s boarding-school background and decayed RP. Miranda Hart is a big girl, I suppose you’d say; not that tall really, but in no way petite, and biggest in the shoulders and bust. Being “feminine” does not come naturally to her onscreen avatar. Although she would never run for fun, she rather likes the idea of galloping. If she brings Jennifer Saunders and AbFab to mind, that’s because she is every bit as bold; but it would have to be pointed out that she is an Eddie Monsoon on the receiving end of life, not the dishing.

Imagine a woman built like Julia Child (and with Child’s verve for sharing secrets in front of the camera — “You’re alone in the kitchen! No one will ever know!”) inspirited by Carol Burnett. Like Carol Burnett, Miranda Hart establishes a warm and vital connection with her audience, whom she frankly addresses throughout the show. (In one episode, she tells a silly joke to her friends, and gets no response; then she tells is to someone else, ditto; and finally she turns to the camera and gives it a third try. “Nothing here, either! Most rude,” she huffs, turning back to the action.) Never has “complicity” been so deliciously exploited: watching the show, you become part of it, all the more when Miranda gets cosy with you and then says, “The pleasure’s all yours, ha ha.”

The basic setup is that Miranda is a young woman of county — well, Surrey — background whose mother (Patricia Hodge) is desperate to make something admirable out of her. Failing matrimony, Mummy would at least like her daughter to have an enviable job; instead of which, Miranda has invested an inheritance in a novelty shop, where you can buy chocolate willies and so forth. Miranda is too much a Hooray Henry herself to run a business; for that she has the blonde and very small Steve (Sarah Hadland). What Miranda wants to do with her time is scheme to attract her friend Gary (Tom Ellis), an unbelievably single piece of masculine attractiveness who runs the café next door. Mr Ellis is almost as pretty as Adrian Grenier, but he is so convincing as a decent bloke that you know that his looks mean nothing to him. After a couple of episodes, actually, I began to worry that the actor resents being exploited, in rather the same way that Marilyn Monroe did. The edge of discomfort in Miranda is not wide, but it scimitar-lengthy. 

I wanted to make a spa day of it and get to bed really early, but the cliffhanger at the end of Miranda Season One made that impossible: I had to know if Gary would stay in Hong Kong (and leave the show). As I watched the first two episodes of Season Two, my impression that the show gets funnier as it goes along was confirmed. “Such fun!” alone… I was in bed, lights out, at 10:30.

***

In the course of preparing this month’s Beachcombing entry — yes, there will be one; it will turn up at the end of the month; I’m experimenting with planning the page as a whole — I struggled to digest a very long entry at Jim Emerson’s Scanners. I put it that way because the entry consists of snips from a discussion, at the Times site, between A O Scott, who reviews film for the newspaper, and David Carr, a media guru, together with Emerson’s commentary, which is rabidly anti-Carr. I’m completely sympathetic (with Emerson), but it’s tricky to negotiate the squabble, especially as Emerson seems determined to fault Carr for faults in rhetorical logic. The cannon is a little to big for the target, but, as I say, I understand Emerson’s frustration. When are people going to understand the point of criticism?

In the discussion, at least as I breezed through it (multiple times, if that’s not a contradiction), Carr sees Scott as a godlike figure who is equipped with “a big box of lightning bolts,” meaning that Scott can shoot down and destroy any movie that he doesn’t like. This is a ridiculous position, as Scott is first to point out, but I am not going to get into the merits of the argument on either side. I encourage you to read the entry at some quiet time when you’re sure that you can let everything else drop for fifteen or twenty minutes. (Three-cornered arguments, no matter how lucid, are hard to follow.) As a regular follower of Scanners, I expect to come across most of Emerson’s points in future entries, and I shall try to feature them more coherently here. For the moment (it’s the weekend!), I want only to make a point that Emerson never gets quite round to clarifying, although I’d love to hear his argument with it: the authority of the film critic rests not in his or her superior understanding of “cinema” or of anything else, but only in the ability to convey a personal impression with clarity and interest.

In this the film critic is just another kind of good writer, not a specialist in movies. There is no such thing as an “objective” evaluation of a movie, even if there are some common mistakes that good films consistently avoid and that “bad” films don’t. (Emerson is fairly clear about this.) What makes Jim Emerson a great film critic right now is his urgency about the personality of movie reviews. The critic ought above all to make his or her personality known to the reader, because it’s from that that the reader will learn whether to expect satisfaction from the movie under review. As an example, it suffices for me to thank Manohla Dargis for her eloquent dislike of movies that I’ve enjoyed very much; when I make a beeline to see a film for which she has declared her contempt in the Times, I don’t feel that I’m right and that she’s wrong; her feeling differently about the picture does not enhance my pleasure. But it may confirm my sense, in advance, that this is a movie that I’m going to like, precisely because she doesn’t like it in the way that she doesn’t like it. Sometimes — I ought to specify (but it’s the weekend) — Dargis dislikes a picture in a way that I’m pretty sure that I’ll share, and I don’t go. That’s the easy part. It’s when she likes a movie that I’ve expected to like: then I’m flummoxed. But that’s my problem, and not the fault of Manohla Dargis!

I’ve been thinking about criticism a lot, in the wake of Nicola Beauman’s biography of Elizabeth Taylor, because negative reviews really got to Taylor, to a degree for which good ones couldn’t compensate, and in the end I’m not sure what purpose they served beyond the reviewer’s very momentary thrill at playing with the thunderbolts (literary critics, unlike their brethren in the dark, really do shoot them). Taylor’s bad reviews, at least as summarized by Beauman, are an anthology of stupidity. Now that Taylor and her critics have been dead for well over a quarter century, the fact that some of them couldn’t think of anything nice to say about her work leads to precisely nothing more than that: it is just so much stairway leading to blind walls. Much to be preferred is the red carpet that the critic cordons off with complete (and as-ostentatious-as-you-like) silence. The only thing to say about junk, if that’s what you think a novel or a movie is no better than, is nothing. Explicit criticism ought to be positive and constructive, except in those rare cases (Manohla Daris and Anthony Lane) where the writing not only bears down on the work but bears out the writer’s character. Which is Jim Emerson’s point: the best critics are great because they write so ably about themselves.

***

Miranda note: I’ve now watched all of both seasons. Let’s not forget Michel Serrault among the influences! There’s an awful lot of Cage aux folles in the psychiatrist episode! In which the best thing, though, is the audience reaction to Miranda’s little fantasy of Gary’s popping in and proposing. Not since the Beatles have I heard such screaming!

***

In her biography of the writer, Nicola Beauman opines, as I think I’ve mentioned, that Elizabeth Taylor was better at short stories than at novels. She strikes a note of impatience with The Sleeping Beauty, for example, feeling that it would have made five or six really great stories instead of just one novel. I don’t intend to agree with this judgment unless the stories, which I’ve just begun reading, really make the novels look bad as they are. Not inferior to the stories — stories and novels are not comparable — but bad as novels, something I don’t expect to conclude.

At the beginning of the Virago collection of the stories — prefaced by Joanna Kingham, Taylor’s daughter, but invisibly edited (there is no sourcing: we’re not told which collections the stories come from, nor the dates of publication in The New Yorker or elsewhere); quite shocking! — stands “Hester Lilly,” Taylor’s novella-length story. To my mind, it is definitely and easily a very long short story, and not a novella. (We’ll see why I think that.) “Hester Lilly” is about marriage. The title character is the orphaned poor relation of a headmaster whose wife is what we would call a narcissist. Robert, the headmaster, invites Hester to take a post as his secretary, over the covert (but transparent) objections of his jealous wife, Muriel.

Until now she had contested his decision to bring Hester into their home, incredulous that she could not have her own way. She had laid about his with every weapon she could find — cool scorn, sweet reasonableness, little girl tears.

Hester is indeed in love with Robert, but it is an affection based on their correspondence prior to her arrival, and it dissipates fairly rapidly in the strain of everyday life. Perhaps it would be better to say that it is transformed into a sense of security; initially afraid of the wildnerness surrounding the school (Hester has not spent time in the country before), she is encouraged to venture into the night, thus beginning a string of adventures that culminates in her marriage to a shy biology teacher who is drawn to her not only by her youth but by a sort of fraternal pity. Along the way, she will encounter a witch-like virago (!) who tempts her to return to the unthreatening but pointless existence from which Robert has rescued her. As to Hester herself, “Hester Lilly” is something of a fairy tale, complete with happy ending.

What gives “Hester Lilly” its thoroughly grown-up strength is the other marriage, the one that Hester seems intended, at first, to destroy. This is shown to be a marriage that has already died, and the showing is what interests Taylor most. Fearing Hester’s threat, Muriel misbehaves in ways that make her husband’s disgust and detachment obvious to her. If we were to look for a fairy-tale angle here, we might say that Hester is a mirror in which Muriel finally sees her own ugliness.

“I cannot make him come to me,” she thought in a panic. “I cannot get my own way.” She became wide awake with a longing for him to make love to her; to prove his need for her; so that she could claim his attention; and so dominate hiim; but at last wished only to conend with her own desires, unusual and humiliating as they were to her.

Such insight was unavailable to Muriel before Hester came to stay.

I want to call attention to the feature that immediately distinguishes “Hester Lilly” from Taylor’s novels. It begins with a situation and not with a scene. In her novels, Taylor introduces herself as a metteur en scène, and takes her time about providing the backgrounds of her characters. In “Hester Lilly,” Taylor takes her time about setting the story at a boys’ preparatory school. There is really no scene at all, just the three characters, Muriel, Hester, and Robert. Hester’s letters are the only prop. The first strong description is of Hester’s outfit.

Hester, in clothes which astonished by their improvisation — the wedding of out-grown school uniform with the adult, gloomy wardrobe of her dead mother — looke jaunty, defiant and absurd. Every garment was grown out of or not grown into.

(“Wedding” is especially artful, as we’ll see when the story ends in preparations for Hester’s wedding.) At no point does Taylor describe the house, formerly the seat of an ancient family (tagged, appropiately, as “Despenser”); the architectural aspect of the atmosphere — so prominent, even to the point of literal deadliness, in Palladian — doesn’t interest her here, despite the length of the story. I’m going to bear that contrast in mind as I make my way through this great delicious book.

***

Mikael HÃ¥fström’s Shanghai arrived the other day, and I watched it at the first opportunity. What had kept a 2010 Weinstein Company production starring John Cusack, Gong Li, Ken Watanabe, and Chow Yun-Fat, set in Shanghai (unlike the more recent movie of the same name) in 1941, out of American theatres? Why wasn’t the video for sale, even? The movie itself offered no clues. It may not be the best movie ever, but it’s very competent when it isn’t actually exciting (which is often), and if the noir element feels a bit shopworn, the actors’ verve is ample compensation. The supporting cast is strong, too: Franka Potente, David Morse, Hugh Bonneville, Nicholas Rowe and Wolf Kahler all stand out, as do a number of Asian actors whom I might have recognized if I followed Mr Chow’s films as religiously as one might.

The mystery at the heart of the story is a McGuffin of which Hitchcock would have been proud: it’s nothing less than the massing of the Japanese fleet from which the attack on Pearl Harbor will be launched. The Americans in the story are of course unaware of this, and it turns out that the hero’s friend who is killed at the beginning of the story wasn’t murdered for that reason, even though he may have been on to the secret. Between the action on the screen and the catastrophe that everyone in the audience sees looming ahead lies a thicket of romance, betrayal, and political resistance that has nothing to do with American inter