Yes, I know that it’s Monday. But it’s still a three-day weekend, Presidents’, as it happens. Kathleen has to go to work anyway — the punchline to a joke that I’m not going to spell out is “What else is there to do in Chicago?” — but I shall be brave and manfully resist the pull of weekday duty. I may even go to the movies. The characteristic paradox is that I’m celebrate taking the day off by sitting at the computer at 7:30 in the morning. For the first time in weeks, I’m up before nine, and, more important, writing before breakfast.

***

Perhaps my renewed vigor has something to do with Kathleen’s having found a house to rent on Fire Island in late August and early September. It turns out to be a house so hjidden by trees and shrubberies that we never get a look at it, even though we passed by it every time we walked between last summer’s house and Ocean Beach. We know right where it is. I know better than to regard the arrangement as a complete certainty, but it’s as certain as it can be at this point, and that’s good enough for me. I’ve asked Kathleen to ask the owners for the name of a good barber within walking or taxi distance from the Bay Shore ferry terminal. That way, I won’t have to come back to Manhattan at all, not for an entire month. I’ll walk on the beach every day for four weeks, barring hurricanes and other calamities. Whatever comes to pass months from now, I’m going to make the most of the wind that is filling my sails this morning.

***

Edward St Aubyn was here in town last week. He spoke/read/signed (presumably) at the Barnes & Noble in Union Square, his one New York appearance. I didn’t know about it until afterward; I hadn’t been keeping up with Maud Newton. Should I have gone? Ought I to have gone? My interest in these affairs has dropped nearly to zero in recent years. Let me be clear about why: writers’ appearances have come to make me wonder why I didn’t do more, in my youth, to become a writer who makes appearances myself. There are very good reasons why I didn’t, but my vanity is bruised by sitting on the wrong side of the podium. Even worse, I can’t expect authors who acknowledge my raised hand to have an inkling of how lucky they are to have my attention. No matter where I sit, no matter how well-received my question, I’m discontented by my unlisted role in the tea party of life at the Princesse de Guermantes’s.  

As of Wednesday, I had read, just like everybody else, St Aubyn’s Melrose novels but nothing else. Now I’m in the slimmer class of those who have also read one of the author’s two other fictions, both of them written between the third and fourth Melroses. On the Edge is an uncertain book about an ensemble cast on a weekend at the Esalen Institute in California. Parts of it are very funny. Maybe it’s all very funny, but if so, the humor of the New Age metaphysical enquiries that cluster, megalithically, in the middle of the book was lost on me.

In large part, my problem with On the Edge is simply my problem with Crystal Bukowski, who turned out, to my surprise, to be the sympathetic female lead. She may even be the lead. At the start, though, she promises to be a satirical gorgon of psychotherapeutic neediness. Her thoughts about the “hillbilly from hell” (who turns out to be a sweet German) sitting next to her on a San Francisco-bound plane are such that you’ll be glad that she’s not sitting next to you. Her very name seens chosen by that wicked little imp, posing as a Muse, who misleads British writers into temptation when it comes to “amusing” American nomenclature. (Who can forgive or forget Martin Amis’s “Lorne Guyland”?) Is St Aubyn aware that Charles Bukowski was a distinctly anti-New-Age California poet, and too highly seasoned an eponym for comic recycling? And “Crystal”! What a lava lamp of British disdain! How can those of us here in America who read more British fiction than our own not recoil at the introduction, in a novel such as this, of someone called Crystal Bukowski? And yet she is the one, in the end, who attains, if not wisdom, then the calm that attends it.

I don’t mean to fault Edward St Aubyn for the odd miscalculated social cue or implausible accent. That’s really part of the fun. Some readers might tire of the recurrence of solecistic Homeric epithets involving the word “unique,” but as a passionate discriminator of the very unique and the most unique, I giggled like my grandson. Others might take offense from the following grossly exaggerated backstory; I was delighted to read something that made Auntie Mame read like John Updike.

Brooke treated everyone like a servant, which, given that she had thirty of them already, showed a lack of imagination. Her servants, on the other hand, she treated like family, her own family having thrust her among servants throughout her childhood. Brought up in the reputedly gracious south, her parents were given over entirely to alcohol, horses and other rich people who shared their interests. They had not allowed Brooke’s childish cries or lisping enquiries into the meaning of life to mar the elegance of their home. Instead she had been housed with one of the innuerable black families whos unadorned shacks cowered under the fatwood trees, their woodsmoke hanging in the humid air almost as substantially as the membranes of Spanish moss that dangled down to meet it. Brooke had often reflected that she had probably been better off living with Mammy. The riding parties that roamed the plantation in search of the perfect place to have some “special iced tea” as they jokingly called the gallon of cold bourbon to which a tiny splash of tea, one mint leaf and a slice of lemon were apprehensively added by the cook, never trotted down that particular track which led to Mammy’s, its astonishingly orange earth making it look more like a river than a road.

… Returning to Mammy’s in the car [after her father’s funeral], Brooke had developed through a clinging ground mist of misery and incomprehension, a revolutionary fury, a suspicion of rich white people that could have borne cross-examination by Malcolm X, and a determiantion to find meaning beyond the familial horizon ringed by stallions and empty bottles, without heading too far in the direction offered by Mammy’s passion for overeating and fainting in church.

This is marvelous stuff, overdone to a turn. There’s an account, not too many pages later, of a mescaline trip that is not only the funniest thing that I’ve ever read about psychedelic psychosis but also (and I speak from experience) by far the most accurate. But then there are Chapters 7 and 10, given over largely to Crystal’s search for enlightenment, and written with an earnest coherence in which ridicule, if it is present at all, plays an extraordinarily recondite part. I felt that this was supposed to be amusing in the way that Aimée Thanatogenous’s career, in Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One, is amusing, but I wasn’t cracking the code.

If anyone is going to be allowed to teach me how to read a book that I don’t get right off the bat, it is Edward St Aubyn. I’m not going to complain that On the Edge wasn’t the romp that I was looking for. I’m going to withhold further commentary until I’ve read A Clue to the Exit, the other non-Melrose entry in the catalogue, which I understand to be even more openly concerned with the problem of identity. (Identity, for St Aubyn, is what memory is for Proust.) We shall see.

***

 Madness: In an abstracted moment, I ordered The Vault, a new Inspector Wexford mystery by Ruth Rendell, from Amazon in England. It arrived, and spent some time in the pile. I fished it out the other night and began reading. It was late; I was too tired to get very far, and I forgot almost everything that I read. Something about bodies in a pit outside a house in St John’s Wood.

When I picked up the book this morning and started at the beginning, I was seized almost at once with an awful chill: I’d read this before. Well, no, not this book, but this story! I remembered the novel that ended with one of those bodies locked up in the pit — still alive! One of the most horrific endings to one of the best Ruth Rendells (and not an Inspector Wexford book at all): A Sight for Sore Eyes.

Having decided not to make houseroom for old mystery stories, I long ago donated my volumes and volumes of Rendell (& Vine), P D James, Ian Rankin, and so on. I may have held on to A Sight for Sore Eyes; I had only a small paperback copy. But even if I did, it wouldn’t be here at the apartment.

Internet to the rescue: a moment’s Googling confirms my suspicions. (As would the rear of the dust jacket had I bothered to look at it.)

The hibernating has me a bit worried. I can’t get up in the morning, and all I want to do is read. I don’t play music much. If I’m lucky enough, I congratulate myself upon the felicity of not having to go outside. I can’t say that I’m particularly tired, or otherwise afflicted. Kathleen, who is not, for the moment, concerned — if I’m still loitering in bed two weeks from now, then we’ll call the doctor — takes a retrospective view: I’m recuperating. Recuperating from what? Recuperating from convalescing from a holiday of colds and mourning? What I feel rather is that I’m storing up energy for something momentous. This is not a good feeling. I hope that Kathleen is right.

All about the apartment, there are signs of a stall: an unpacked shopping bag, a stack of DVDs that ought to be put away somewhere, an old picture frame that I have to ask Kathleen about (repair or toss?). In the bathroom this morning, I was confronted by a roll of toilet paper on the counter by the sink, and an empty box of Kleenex. In the kitchen, the ice bin was empty. These little jobs ordinarily have to wait until I’ve done my morning writing, but I didn’t trust myself to get to them later. I took care of them before I sat down. But I stopped short of replacing the shower-curtain liner, even though the replacement liner has been lying on the bathroom counter for nearly three months.

Yesterday, I came home from lunch with a friend, changed into dry clothes, and sat in the bedroom and read. I read for hours. I read an entire novel, Alan Hollinghurst’s The Spell. It put me under a spell, but I was a willing subject. The hero, Alex Nichols, is a very nice man. Although beautiful, he is buttoned-down and very shy. He likes his job overseeing pension funds at the Foreign Office. He is 36 or 37, and heartbroken by the defection of his boyfriend, who after a two-year relationship up and moved out, claimed, we soon learn, by another man. Alex is deeply demoralized at the beginning, but Hollinghurst makes sure that your pity never idles into contempt. At an awkward weekend house party, Alex meets somebody new, and falls under his spell. You know it can’t work, but, again, Hollinghurst steers you away from clucking disapprovingly and deriding Alex for not sharing your misgivings. You have to find out how Alex will bear up under the inevitable second helpings of wretchedness.

Here’s how:

This second failure was a shocking reinforcement of the first. And yet he had to admit that there was something ambiguously easier about it too: he already knew the lesson, he knew the bereft amazement of finding that you had unwittingly had your last fuck, your last passionate kiss, your last taxi-ride hand-in-hand in the gloom; and he knew too that on both occasions there had been signals, like the seen but noiseless drum-strokes of a tympanist checking his tuning.

In short, he bears up nicely.

***

 Here it is, Friday morning, and I ought to be at the movies, but that’s not happening. I was going to see W/E, Madonna’s movie about the Windsors. (In the trailer, Laurence Fox stutters at least as well as Colin Firth did in the same role.) I want to see if Andrea Riseborough is as superb as Anthony Lane says she is. And Judy Parfitt as Queen Mary — how terrifying is that! (In the trailer, her way with “a married woman!” all but curdles the film stock.) Also, there’s Abbie Cornish, who appeals to me for no special reason.

The Abdication Crisis fascinated me when I was a teenager, possibly because I was too young to understand it, but more likely because I was genuinely confused by the opposing pulls of duty and glamour. Without the glamour, there would be no story at all, nothing even as noteworthy as Prince Leopold’s dying of hemophilia and not marrying Alice Liddell. Running off to marry Wallis Simpson was clearly wrong, but what fantastic style! And then the abdication turned out to be best for England as well — probably. Had Edward VIII been a man of honor, his niece would still have succeeded him, but there might not have been a throne for her to sit on.

The one and only time that I consulted a microfilm as an undergraduate, it was to see what The New Yorker had to say about “the woman I love.” Nothing, actually — Janet Flanner’s piece (Jan 19, 1936) doesn’t mention Mrs Simpson. Here is the final paragraph, which seems to stand for the proposition that There Will Always Be An English Muddle:

Politically, the English are dualists in a manner fomerly confined to metaphysics. With their rational mind, they empower democracy, but with their emotional imagination, they still give credit, perhaps wisely, to that miracle-loving element in human beings which tends toward iconography, kings, prophets, and special beings in strange, lovely garments. This element in other lands has recently found its less monarchic outlet in Nazi trappings, Fascist fanfares, a Communism which makes a shrine of Lenin’s tomb, and, in America, a worship of cinema stars. King Edward has left the hierarchic for the romantic. He has been temporarily distrusted; it is possible that hereafter he will always be loved.

“Loved” is not quite the word for the spell that the Windsors cast.  

Last Friday, we saw Woody Allen again, Ms NOLA and I. We had just turned the corner from 82nd Street onto Madison Avenue, and were heading south, to Crawford Doyle. With the gentlest insistence, Ms NOLA urged me to look up. (She knows that, because of ankylosing spondylitis, my eyes are usually directed at the pavement when I’m walking.) I did as bid, and there they were, Mr & Mrs, walking in our direction. As soon as I had taken them in, I dropped my gaze. It felt like an invasion of privacy to have paid any attention at all. But this time, at least, I did see him.

***

We had been coming from the Museum the first time, too. I think that we had just seen the Diane Arbus exhibit. It was snowing, heavily and quietly. I wanted a cup of tea, or perhaps I’d just bought some books at the gift shop, but in any case we kept straight on 82nd Street. It was on the Park Avenue median that Ms NOLA asked me if I’d seen him. Whom? Woody Allen. No, I hadn’t. I’d been too busy airing my latest theories about the bourgeoisie.

I remember what I was talking about because I hoped, when Ms NOLA told me whom we’d just passed, that Woody Allen hadn’t been too lost in thought to hear me carrying on as if I were re-enacting a familiar scene from one of his movies. In the middle of the day, an older man, who probably ought to be at work, discourses sagely to a pretty young woman, in whom he takes an avuncular but not ungallant interest. We might have been John Houseman and Martha Plimpton, in Another Woman. What enameled the incident with perfection was my having been too busy dispensing my wisdom to notice the passing writer and director.

Never had I felt so compleatly the New Yorker. If Woody Allen didn’t catch me in the act, it wasn’t my fault.

Circuses have never appealed to me. Animals don’t really interest me, and I don’t care for their smell. But it’s the human component that puts me off. In the circus, the illusion that the performing artist is having a good time — common to all the arts, even the ones that don’t involve performance; this is why everyone wants to meet artists (a mistake in most cases) — is exaggerated to the point of a smirking dare. Can you possibly be so stupid as to imagine that pleasure has anything at all to do with the clown’s leering grin?

All of this is precisely what made the circus appealing to modernists like Stravinsky, and to his sophisticated audiences, who considered themselves superior to bourgeois, fun-seeking naïveté. The pathos of circus life underlies the brittleness of Petrouchka, of course, but it was after World War I that Stravinsky made the pathos itself brittle, and never moreso than in L’Histoire de soldat, a circus-within-a-circus work that I wish I could have stayed for at last night’s ACJW recital at Weill Recital Hall. The important thing is that I got to hear the companion piece, commissioned by ACJW and Carnegie Hall, that was played before the intermission, a 25-minute work in three movements with pre-, inter-, and postludes, written by four composers as a consortium called Sleeping Giant. Had I been able to stay for the longer second part of the program — had I not had a date for Valentine’s Day dinner with my wife — I expect that I’d have found the Stravinsky interesting but slightly stale, at least after Histories, as the companion piece is called, proved to be both so interesting and so novel.

At dinner, after I’d described it, Kathleen asked me if I thought that Histories would work as a recording. I’d love to find out, but I’d have to sit through a second performance to be sure. Histories is the first piece of purely instrumental music that I’ve ever heard of, aside of course from Haydn’s Farewell Symphony, that asks the musicians to do something besides play. At one point, the four wind players left the stage for stations in the side aisles, from which they blew through their instruments so as to suggest winds or waves, although of course no suggestion at all may have been intended. It would be easy to make the staging of Histories sound silly, but in fact it was fun. That’s what makes Histories essentially unlike the work from which it draws its inspiration. Today’s younger classical-music composers are after serious fun. Nothing could be more rigorously strained out of their music than the cynicism that is always curdling the edges of Stravinsky’s work.

***

The four composers who constitute Sleeping Giant are Andrew Norman, Jacob Cooper, Robert Hornstein, and Christopher Cerrone (it seems that there are six giants in all, two of whom did not participate in this project), and their collaboration is rich enough but also sufficiently unified to suggest a new School of New York — a School of Brooklyn, more like. Born between 1979 and 1984, these musicians have evidently made a commitment to the traditional materials of classical music — the instruments, the system of notation, and of course the long list of compositions. But they are also young men of today, presumably unfamiliar with the deviceless life and as keen to have something happen right now as any gamer — or not! Although I can easily imagine a response to Histories that would dismiss it as racket and noise when it wasn’t repetitious, I’m very aware that such dismissals invariably attend early departures in new directions; you can go all the way back to Hugo’s Hernani for fine examples of fustian disapproval.  I am certainly not equipped to describe Histories in terms that would argue its musical accomplishments, but I can try to tell you why I liked it.

Histories adopts the orchestration of Stravinsky’s suite from L’Histoire du soldat: violin (Keats Dieffenbach), bass (Brian Ellingsen), clarinet (Paul Won Jin Cho), bassoon (Shelley Monroe Huang), trumpet (Nathan Botts), trombone (Richard Harris), and percussion (David Skidmore). And it borrows a few themes, or fragments of themes. But it is most like Stravinsky in that it doesn’t sound like Stravinsky at all; rather, it renews what you might call his exploration of the atomic structure of music. What is music, really, and what exactly does a trombone do? In order to engage an audience with these questions, you have to call attention to what’s going on on stage, and avoid sending the listeners off into reveries. Sleeping Giant has two principal strategies for making things fresh, and both depend on unblended textures in which, playing together, instruments nevertheless resist producing a “joint” sound. One strategy is to ripple the textures with complicated but comprehensible rhythms; another is to luxuriate reiteravely. The contributions of Mr Cooper (“Agitated, stumbling, like an endless run-on sentence”) and Mr Cerrone (“Marionettes”) exploit the first approach; Mr Hornstein’s “Recovering” embodies the second, taking a phrase from Stravinsky’s “Pastorale” and marbling it on the vibraphone.

Andrew Norman provides the prelude, the interludes, and the postludes, brief bits of amusing warm-up music that I should have appreciated better if I were more familiar with L’Histoire du soldat — my bad. His pieces established Mr Skidmore, the percussionist, as the MC/ringmaster of Histories. The proceedings were cued throughout by the scratching of a gourdlike instrument in the form of an oversized baguette. At Mr Skidmore’s signal, the other instrumentalists turned this way or that, or froze in place; it might have been dreadfully fatuous if it hadn’t been so light-handed.

The titles of the individual pieces proved to be singularly apt. Mr Skidmore’s virtuosos drumming propelled the “run-on sentence” of Mr Cooper’s composition. Did it go on for too long? I didn’t think so, but I probably would have been less patient thirty years ago. Although there wasn’t much in the way of a tune (I understate) and the drumming was insistent, I was never annoyed or eager for the piece to stop. It stopped just about where it ought to. Mr Cerrone’s “Marionettes” was exactly that, if you can imagine not little people on strings but ferocious tropical, perhaps prehistorical birds, all of them pecking at indigestible diamonds. I didn’t think of birds while the music lasted; it was only when it was over, and I asked myself, “What was that?” that the image popped into view. If you really pay attention to “Marionettes,” you probably won’t have the mental room for daydreaming about birds.

***

 This would be a good point to write about the enormous shift in sophistication that Histories registers — the shift, that is, from Stravinsky’s hyper-sophisticated faux-folk music. Sleeping Giant, for example, stands in utterly different relation to the popular; in our time, it is the popular that is overworked to the point of corruption, and classical music that is, somewhat astonishingly, artless. I shall leave it at that. I was grateful to hear Histories in the Weill, because gold-and-white neoclassical rooms are part of the classical-music tradition, too, and I am more at home in them than I would be (I expect; I haven’t been) at a downtown venue such as Le Poisson Rouge. The venue underscored the degree to which Sleeping Giant is up to something really new.

Two stories in today’s Times seem to me to ring the same bell. Joe Nocera lights into the NCAA yet again, this time in a somewhat backward fashion, by “praising” the organization for turning a blind eye on entrenched practices in amateur/collegiate hockey that it would prohibit in any other sport. Nocera believes that these practices are beneficial to young athletes and ought to be the rule, not the exception. Why aren’t they? Because they interfere with revenue streams that accrue to colleges at the athletes’ expense, that’s why. It’s pretty sickening stuff.

The other story needs even less in the way of summary. Truly independent fair-labor watchdogs are laughing at Apple’s pious decision to sponsor the investigation of the Foxconn City plants, where many of its products are made, by the Fair Labor Association — an outfit that, like the NCAA, is funded by the very enterprises that it is supposed to regulate.

(Technical point: the FLA will be investigating Apple’s supplier, not Apple itself. Ultimately, however, it is Apple’s decision to continue working with the Foxconn City folks that is on the line.)

Into those stories, stir the debate about the Volcker Rule. Bankers are complaining that the Rule will cost them inordinate amounts of money and also lead to job loss. Volcker to banks: tough noogies.

What all three of these stories have in common, I think, is that the behavior to be prevented or regulated is wicked. Not criminal, necessarily, but certainly nasty. Take sweatshop conditions, where the factory might be clean and well-ventilated but the workers are subject to a midnight wake-up call to meet the whims of some dork at Apple (happily no longer likely to be “the best businessman in the world today,” Dork-in-Chief Steve Jobs). How do you rationalize treating workers badly? Here’s how you do it in the early Twentieth Century: you exploit Chinese workers. You exploit Confucian ethics and Asian authoritarianism: They’re like that anyway. And maybe they are, but of course that’s not the point, not if you’re an American wondering what it cost to put an iPad in your hands for only $500.

The case of the NCAA is darkly fascinating. The point of the Association is to protect athletes from commercial exploitation. All well and good, but the mission was corrupted when the schools belonging to the Big Ten and the other football circuits were in a position to do the commercial exploitation. Once again, the underlying behavior, the exploitation of adolescent athletes, is obviously wicked. No matter who does it, it’s wrong! And Joe Nocera is certainly making the case that schools are exploiting their so-called student athletes. Even if the player gets a degree, what has he actually learned in school? How well are thesse “students” prepared for the lives that they will, with any luck, live to live after their bodies cease to be profit centers?   

***

As for the bankers, can anyone tell me where, on this particular moment on the Blue Planet, big banking is being done in a responsible, constructive way that does more than pour the odd bonus into punters’ pockets? South America, perhaps. You don’t hear terrible things these days about South American banking. Maybe it’s in no shape to keep up with the smart alecks in Japan, China, Europe, and the United States who have developed a broad portfolio of fucked-up strategies.

(And while we’re on the subject of smart alecks, may I suggest to Andrew Ross Sorkin that addressing Paul Volcker, even in hypothetical punditry, with a sentence beginning “C’mon…” is unbecoming? ) 

My question is this: how do you “regulate” wickedness? Is it possible?

It’s a little early to be writing about Adam Nicolson’s The Gentry: Stories of the English (Harper Press), not because it hasn’t come out in the United States yet, but because I haven’t read very much of it. But it’s great fun — which I probably oughtn’t to say, either, because there is nothing frivolous about Nicolson’s examination of the chancy careers of a handful of English families over the past five hundred years.  What these families have in common is the time that they spend in the way station that we call “the gentry.” Some go on to greater things, while others sink back into obscurity. In each case, a heady brew of prudence, decisiveness and luck determines the outcome. We might think of the English gentry in placid terms of teacups and hedgerows, and doubtless there are families that have held on to their mossy manors for centuries without stooping to trade or rising to nobility. Nicolson’s people, however, are adventurers almost to the same degree as seafaring pirates. A lot of what they do isn’t nice, and it certainly isn’t lawful. Lying and cheating, acts that supposedly destroy any claims to the status of gentleman, abound in most of the tales. 

They abound in most of the tales that I’ve read, anyway — about a third of them. I have a sense of why The Gentry is important, not just as a history book, but even more as a study of family life; but I’m going to let it continue to develop as I read the book.   

***

Little did I imagine, when I wrote the foregoing, that any of Nicolson’s gentry actually were pirates, but such seems to be the case with Sir John Oglander’s immediate ancestors — Sir John may have dabbled at it himself, in his youth. There is no other way to account for family holdings that, by 1610, yielded annual revenues of about £800.

During his halcyon days, between returning to an estate on the Isle of Wight from which his family had decamped after being spooked by the passing Armada, and 1632, when his adored oldest son died of smallpox, on a junket to France, Sir John Oglander was an embodiment of the ideals of husbandry. He oversaw everything that was done on and to his extensive landholdings; he also belonged to the mandarinate that governed the localities of England — until, that is, he lost his perch, as a Royalist, in the Civil War. And he wrote it all down. He kept an account book with abundant diaristic interpolations that might well find a place on the shelf next to Virgil’s Georgics.

“He was his ancestry and his posterity,” writes Nicolson — wishfully, I think. The conceit of Sir John’s life was that human affairs, if properly moderated, could be as fertile and self-renewing as tended fields and herds. But Sir John turned out to be a singularity. No one before or after him kept such account books; no one seems to have cared quite as much as Sir John did for the rhythms of agriculture. His second son, climbing up in the world, became a baronet, and in the following century the Oglanders became genuinely rich. But the main line died out in 1874, and the riches were dispersed in entails. There are still Oglanders on the Isle of Wight, but they sold Sir John’s beloved Nunwell in 1982.

In the introduction to his three Seventeenth-Century stories, Adam Nicolson writes about “The Storm over the Gentry” that raged amongst scholars and historians in the middle of the last century, as theories explaining the Civil War in terms of this or that understanding of “the gentry” were launched and shot down. Theories of any kind would have been the legacy of Marxism, and the gentry, a class without boundaries that existed nowhere but in Britain, defied Marxian analysis. That’s because the gentry don’t constitute a genuine class. People describable as “gentry” for whatever reason you like are indeed travelers from one class to another, and none of the portraits in Nicolson’s book (that I’ve read so far) demonstrates this more clearly than that of Sir John Oglander, who derived bottomless satisfaction from the faux sempiternality of his world — until his son died. Sir John’s dream of the gentry life, like his son, predeceased him. His descendants moved on to other things. And piracy, of all things, was the foundation of Sir John’s dream. It is impossible to tie up Sir John Oglander, much less the gentry as an amalgam, in any kind of theoretical bow. The only thing that the gentry always seem to have is the time in which to make agreeable stories about themselves sound convincing. 

***

About twenty years ago, I was falling in love with husbandry. My “manor” was a half-acre of heavily shaded hillside, with a problematic water supply and an openly dodgy septic system, but, as I say, I was in love, and being reasonable had nothing to do with it. The very best thing that can be said about my folly was that it was expensive; I’m not about to share the worse. Looking back, I can’t begin to grasp how I managed to justify my outlays in terms of husbandry and stewardship, but that’s because, as I’ll say again, I was in love, and when the love passed away (something that I couldn’t imagine ever happening, of course), the rationales disappeared along with it. I only thought of it today because the story of Sir John Oglander set the memories tingling.

It’s a bad idea to fall in love with a way of life. It’s imprudent, first of all; every change — and change is inevitable — comes as a disappointment. Beyond that, the beloved way of life tends to age into a bar against real happainess. As you service the idol of your self-image, you’re tied down to a way of thinking that hinders growth — and growth is inevitable, too. If you’re forced to grow within the confines of an established routine, you’ll merely grow uncomfortable.

This is why, in order to enjoy your way of life to the full, you must be indifferent to its durability.  

We went downtown today to take Will to the park for an hour or so. It was incredibly cold. Running around in the playground kept us warm for a while, but a few minutes’ standing outside the big dog run nearly killed us. We repaired to Sustainable NYC, a shop on Avenue A that we’ve visited many times without being aware of the café in the back (perhaps it’s new?). We learned the real meaning of the word “oasis.” As well, in any case, as we’re ever going to learn it in New York. The moment we sat down, Will’s cheeks, rosy until then, bloomed a livid purple.

The other night, when we were babysitting, we discovered that Will loves money. What he loves about money is scrunching it up and holding it very tight. If you were unaware that American currency has a large fabric component, you would know all about it after handling one of Will’s macerated bills. All I can think of is a new twist on the phrase, “interest-rate squeeze.”

This afternoon, Kathleen placed the change from purchasing our refreshments on the table, and I handed it over to Will. There was a ten and a five and some change. (Sustainable NYC is truly sustainable for customers as well.) After the squeezing, there was much laying-out and counting. At one point, I asked Will for the ten, and he gave to me, just like that. When I asked him for the five, though, he refused. “Nope,” he said. “Well,” I said, “give it to Darney, then.” “It’s Darney’s,” I said. Putting the five in Darney’s hands was an immediate urgency; Will couldn’t hand it over fast enough. As well he might: nothing short of himself would have roused Kathleen on a frigid Sunday in February.

When we weren’t with Will this weekend, we were more or less hibernating. ‘Tis the season. 

Nancy Mitford to Lady Pamela Berry, 4 January 1952:

The Cabrols & Co have asked me to write a little sketch for them to act so it is to be an old French Duke & his wife sitting in their tourist-infected château while their only child explains to them that she is now a man. Everything she says is echoed by what the tourists are saying, you can imagine how it might be funny. They are having a revue this year to replace the usual ball — Charlie [Beistegui] is supposed to have killed balls for ever.

I found this letter when I looked up Carlos Beistegui in the index to Love From Nancy, Mitfords letters. I wasn’t entirely sure that his name would appear, but of course, there it was. Nancy didn’t go to the Beistegui ball, but she did date a letter to Gladwyn Jebb “Beistegui Ball Day.” The ball was given, in the Palazzo Labia at Venice, on 3 February 1951, and it did not kill balls for ever, because Truman Capote (who didn’t go, either) made sure that it didn’t.

Now you will be asking, “WTF Charlie Beistegui?” as, indeed, I have been doing for years. According to Wikipedia, he is “not to be confused with his uncle (1863-1953), whose collection of notable 18th- and 19th-century paintings was donated to the Louvre.” You can — and ought to — check out the guest list; there are many other WTF names. 

In another letter to Lady Pamela, one that editor Charlotte Mosley declined to print in full but a passage from which appears in a footnote to the letter to Sir Gladwyn, Nancy wrote, “I suppose it is rather dotty not to go to the Ball. But a dress of the mingiest description would have been £200 — the whole thing would have cost £300 I guess, hardly worth it.”

And there you have it: why Nancy Mitford remained on the fringe of what was called Café Society. Nancy never says that she was invited to the ball, but presumably she could have got in had she wanted to go. But to spend all that money on a costume? The Mitford commitment to frivolity had its limits.

Nevertheless, Nancy Mitford knew a lot of the poeple who constituted Café Society, and their names pepper Mosley’s footnotes. Mostly the footnotes, one suspects, because Café Societals (if I may be permitted) were not much given to writing. It’s not just that writing is work, hard work even for the most fluent writers, but also that writing is such a damned disorderly experience. You write a sentence and read it and think about it and can’t decide what’s not quite right about it, because there’s a verb out that stoutly refuses to come to mind, and, what’s this, a slew of typos. You can see why people who were almost studious about their soigné appearance would find the very act of writing unpleasant. (Now we know why Edith Wharton did all her writing first thing in the morning, while still in bed.) The picture on the dust jacket of Love From Nancy shows the writer seated in her drawing room in the rue Monsieur, with a stiff-backed writing pad on her lap, braced on the arm of her bergère. It would be fun to know how much the dress that she’s wearing cost. I doubt very much that the picture tells us what Nancy looked like when she was hard at work.

When I was a boy, Elsa Maxwell’s name was in the air. Who was Elsa Maxwell? She gave parties and knew Everybody and was an important member of Café Society, whatever that was. I doubt that my parents had a much clearer picture of Maxwell than I did. Then, in the last days of my youth, Diana Vreeland, another member of Café Society (said to be dead at the time), published Allure, with lots of pictures of fat and ugly old Elsa Maxwell. Who was she?

There was no Internet in those days. You might find out a tidbit here or there, but you’d never remember it, because everything about Café Society was ephemeral, especially its history.

Which is why I bought, after much agonizing over the expense (thirty-five seconds), Thierry Coudert’s Café Society: Socialites, Patrons, and Artists 1920 to 1960 (Flammarion), at the Museum yesterday. I expect that it will be gracing a lot of Upper East Side coffee tables this season, and for many seasons to come, because it is the ideal coffee-table book. Lots of pictures, many of them iconic, with a few pages of small print about the important people. I have always always always wanted to know who Mona Bismarck was, and I have never never never been able to hold a single fact about her in my mind for longer than a gnat’s lifespan. Now I have a book. Bismarck, who was born in Louisville and who married five times (the fourth was to the Iron Chancellor’s grandson), was — beautiful and rich, and of course unhappy at the end. If they lived long enough, these people were usually unhappy.

The inspiration for Thierry Coudert’s book appears to be a sweet and jolly scrapbook kept by — guess who! — the baron and baronne de Cabrol!

Having opened Nancy Mitford’s letters, I had to go on reading a few, and I came across this gem, from a letter about her wildly successful trip (she was “lionized”) to Rome, after the publication of The Blessing.

Of course I am in a fog, know nobody’s name & said to a very grand Italian, thinking he was English “I suppose you know a lot of Italians?” which went down very badly.

I suddenly understood that the marvelous charm of the Mitford girls owes to their all having been naughty little boys in youth.

When I find out where the Café was, I’ll let you know.

Here is a quick example of Edward St Aubyn’s magnificent prose style.

As a guest, Emily Price had three main drawbacks: she was incapable of saying please, incapable of saying thank you and incapable of saying sorry, all the while creating a surge in the demand for these expressions.

As a piece of English-language architecture, it’s as magnifcent as any country house (a house in town would be more severely punctuated, with quotes around the expressions and a colon after “sorry”), but it is also a clarion call for attentive decency (our favorite subject). Emily Price is a lout, which is unusual in a woman and therefore remarkable. With a man as its subject, the statement wouldn’t be as funny — but the surge wouldn’t be as extreme, either.

It’s his decency that redeems Patrick Melrose, that makes his miserable lapses into drug and drink abuse easy to overlook, at least when Patrick is not actually falling down or, more likely, lighting the fuse on a highly volatile situation. It’s his decency that makes him an interesting man, and not just the victim of beastly parents. (You’d think that his father, what with raping him for three years, would win the worst-parent laurels, but his mother’s incompetence as a human being makes his father’s wickedness seem ornamental.)

I spent an hour or so yesterday reading up on St Aubyn, who indeed, as one feared from various reviews, has drawn the Melrose saga from his own personal history. I managed to order copies of the two novels that he wrote in between Some Hope and Mother’s Milk; by the time they arrive, I’ll have finished At Last, which is, currently at least, the final Melrose novel. I wouldn’t be so sure. St Aubyn thought that he was through with Melrose after Some Hope; indeed, that’s the title given to an omnibus edition of the three Melrose novels that St Aubyn wrote before writing On the Edge and A Clue to the Exit, his two non-Melrose books. He wrote Mother’s Milk about a man called Mark something, but eventually realized that he was simplty continuing Patrick’s story. (He has a funny story to tell about what happened when he instructed his word processor to make the global change in names; a moment’s thought — aided by rueful experience — will probably tell it to you.) Now we have At Last, which begins (and, for all I know, ends) with Patrick’s mother’s funeral.

The Melrose novels may be the world’s longest suicide note, as well as (so far) an unsuccessful one. They constitute a letter written by a man who intends to take his own life, but who falls under the spell of his own writing. Not that you should imagine an attractive enchantment; one interviewer elicited from St Aubyn the confession that he wrote most of the first three books bare-chested, with a towel around his waist to soak up the sweat that poured out of him as he confessed his ghastly family secrets. (I don’t think that I could write very well under such conditions, but there you are — I’m no artist.) St Aubyn did indeed want to kill himself, and try to kill himself, but was saved by a rapture with the myth of Sisyphus. (Camus’s tract is mentioned early on in Bad News.) He would deal with the only serious philosophical problem (whether to commit suicide) as a novelist, doing the two things that the best novelists do so well that it’s hard to tell them apart: animating vivid characters with assiduous writing. Stories are all very well, but they can’t be allowed to upstage or trip up the quadrille of personages and prose, and St Aubyn has a wonderfully ironic way of not telling stories by hoovering them into backflashes. (The bit about Emily Price, above, comes from such a passage; Mary Melrose, sitting in the crematorium, is remembering a disastrous vacation in Provence.)  

I can sit here all day writing about these books — if I didn’t have a lunch date, that is — but it’s no use: writing about suicide notes is hardly going to fill up the tent. The only thing to do is to quote. From page 6 of the first novel, Never Mind.

When she had first met David twelve years ago, she had been fascinated by his looks. The expression that men feel entitled to wear when they stare out of a cold English drawing room onto their own land had grown stubborn over five centuries and perfected itself in David’s face.

 I really do believe that Jane Austen and Edward St Aubyn are in a class by themselves.

Update: “surge in THE demand”; corrected, after a painful Google search, on 16 February.

Has anyone out there seen Brice de Nice, the 2005 comedy co-written by and starring Jean Dujardin? It is definitely a movie to bear in mind while you’re watching The Artist, if you can manage the cognitive dissonance. M Dujardin, who may receive an Academy Award for his suave performance in the latter film — he’s the compleat star that Old Hollywood never had, Douglas Fairbanks, Fred Astaire, Gary Cooper and Cary Grant all rolled into one — turns out to be no less a maestro when it comes to playing jerks. He’s Jack Black, Peter Sellers, Sid Caesar and Jackie Gleason all rolled into one. Throw in a little Buster Keaton for pathos — Jean Dujardin’s jerks are almost but not quite too lovable to be jerks.

My DVD of Brice de Nice offers no subtitles; I couldn’t even get the close-captioning to work. So I had no idea what the actors were saying most of the time. The only “dialogue” that was crystal clear occurred when Brice ploddingly read a newspaper story about his father’s arrest for money laundering, with his finger moving along the page. Language was not a barrier to understanding and enjoying the film, however. If it had been shot in Urdu, I’d have got it. All you really need to know is that 1991 classic, Point Break. If you know Point Break, you will understand why, for example, Brice, now that his allowance has been cut off by his father’s arrest for money laundering, and after he has failed to hold down a job as a waiter, wears two face masks of Jacques Chirac, one on the back of his head, when he attempts to hold up the Caisse de Nice. “Je suis le président de la Republique!” he declares. Break dancing ensues.

You may be aware that there isn’t much in the way of surf on the Côte d’Azur. But Brice is hopeful; he paddles out first thing every morning and sits wistfully on his board. When, later in the picture, no longer on the Mediterranean, he is confronted by an actual wave, well, you should see the look on his face.

There’s a very funny clip of Jean Dujardin on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon? He does an imitation of Robert De Niro, then an imitation of a camel, and then he combines them, doing a camel who is also Robert De Niro. In Brice de Nice, he offers another improvisatorial combination. It’s part Keanu Reeves and part 30 year-old moron with shoulder-length bottle-blond hair that keeps getting in his face. The little twisty shake of his head that gets the hair out of his eyes is pure Keanu Reeves, although I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen Mr Reeves actually do it. The deeper joke is that Brice idolizes the other star of Point Break, Patrick Swayze.

I expect that a subtitled edition of Brice de Nice will be available sooner or later. Sure, it’s dopey, but, like the two OSS 117 movies, it’s a riff on movies that Americans are very familiar with, and it’s much, much nicer than either of the Hangover movies.

Perhaps it’s the afterburn of Edward St Aubyn’s Bad News, the Melrose novel in which hero Patrick spends a few mightily drug-addled days in Manhattan (with a junket to the Bronx), but I’m feeling as though I’ve been on some sort of non-traveling trip, induced by immersion in a lot of other people’s creative imaginations.

The Melrose books themselves — I’m not too far into Mother’s Milk — have induced the now very rare feeling that I am living in alternate worlds, my own and the novels’. Almost everything that I do is internally reported in a voice that distinctly belongs to an English writer who is twelve years my junior. There is nothing grandiose about this; I’m not wallowing in the notion that my life is the stuff of great fiction and worthy of being written about. (It is worthy of writing about, but by me, and as nonfictionally as possible.) It’s just that the novels have me noticing everyday things and routines as if they were captioned, and my job were to fill in the words. That’s how intensely St Aubyn’s prose has clicked with my way of being conscious.

(Not my way of writing, certainly. St Aubyn writes strong but lean sentences, in which dependent clauses almost always signal facetiousness, as if only idiots required explanations. Isn’t that what you’d expect, though, of a fictional voice preoccupied by the opening line of The Myth of Sisyphus?

***

How about a bit of housekeeping? Things are always changing at these sites of mine, and it’s hard to keep up. I tweak and fiddle with “improvements,” but then I don’t tell anyone about them, and then I get cross when people don’t figure things out for themselves. As if nobody had anything better to do.

But first, two items that I left off my Morse Questionnaire. I watched Remorseful Day at last last night, and so now this Morse jag is really done. Because I had watched the shows in order, I understood Morse’s heartbreak at losing Adele, the music teacher with whom he almost got something permanent going; she went to Australia and decided to stay there. The heartbreak becomes quite literal in the ensuing episode, and the final shot, to the strains of Parsifal, is a pan of Oxford’s dreaming spires in a mist. 

• Indoor swimming pool (Y/N).
• Institutional election (Y/N).

There. Back to housekeeping. If you are a regular reading, I recommend that you bookmark not this site but the old Daily Blague. There you will find an entry that bears the same title and image as its corresponding one here, but also, a link to that corresponding entry that is set to open The Daily Blague / reader in the same pane of your browser. I don’t know about you, but I prefer a default setting that opens links in new windows, but I’ve chosen the alterenative setting in this case to make it easy for you to return to The Daily Blague and post comments on what you’ve read here, if you have any. (Comments, not corrections; write to me privately about the latter.)

Is it time to start talking about Web 3.0? This would be the ghost-downtown Web, the gated-community Web, the Web of Facebook, Twitter, and iPhone apps: the Web that’s already familiar and that you no longer want to know too much more about, not in any one sitting, anyway. The Web in which the flâneur might just as well stay at home.

Ah, the flâneur, beloved figment of Web 1.0.

And yet, reading Evgeny Morozov’s contribution to the Times‘s Sunday Review — well, I didn’t even have to start reading. There was Caillebotte’s great picture (still the best reason to visit Chicago), Rue de Paris, temps de pluie, with its burghers walking in the rain. Don’t say that they’re “strolling”; don’t imagine that their amiably aimless air has anything to do with Baudelaire or Benjamin. The setting may be “Paris” to you, but when Caillebotte painted it, this was one of the newest developments in town, too new for much greenery. (According to my map, it is now known as the Place de Dublin.) Neither grand nor funky, it was the last place you’d expect to encounter an errant bohemian in search of serendipity.

Maybe that was the point. Maybe the Times image editor appreciated the irony of illustrating “The Death of the Cyberflâneur” with a picture of post-flâneur Paris. That would be very clever. But I doubt that many readers saw it that way.

Meanwhile…(ahem): chopped liver? What am I doing here, do you suppose?

***

I don’t know much about Baudelaire & Benjamin’s idea of the flâneur; I’d never heard of it before the Web came along. AtWikipedia, I see, alongside the Caillebotte, that “the concept of the flâneur is important in academic discussions of the phenomenon of modernity.” I’ll try not to hold that against it. (Modernity turned out to be such a wicked idea.) The flâneur discovers that he (or she) is the ultimate arbiter of what’s interesting in the busy stream of city life, where the odds of running into something unexpected are at not only generally higher than they are anywhere else but also subject to rapid change, capable of dropping to zero if you walk into a newsstand where they sell lottery tickets. But we’re not here to talk about city life. We’re hear to evaluate Morozov’s claim, “Hardly anyone “surfs” the Web anymore.”

(Can we speak of the “surfeur”? Best not.)

I’m trying to think of the last time I did anything like surfing. Nothing comes to mind. I begin the workday with 1000+ unread feeds and try to whittle the number down. Lately, I’ve been canceling “subscriptions” to sites right and left. Beachcombing is one thing, looking for needles in haystacks is another (I’m thinking of WSJ’s Speakeasy, which sued to turn up the occasional tidbit of interest.) I may follow a link from a site to which one my feeds leads me, but this doesn’t happen often; as a rule, my feeds take me to long reads, after which I have to lie down, far from a computer screen.

If people aren’t surfing as much as they used to do, that’s because a lot of the odd and intriguing stuff has been discontinued. Stocking a site with catchy items is great fun at first, but then you either run out of material or resent the obligation to crank it out. Or both. You either give it up or adopt a professional attitude. This is where the difficulty in Internet flânerie comes in: to have a clear idea of what you’re doing, and a regular schedule for doing it, then close encounters with the surprising are going to become unlikely.

On the other hand, the space that used to be taken up by weird fun is filling up with sites such as The Awl, the comic carapace of which you don’t have to scratch very hard to feel the warm vibration of genuine thinking. Remember Maria Bustillos’s piece on David Foster Wallace’s “self-help” library? Of course you do. It was so intensely surprising that the actual library, the books that Wallace had marked up with comments about his mother, were withdrawn from public access. That sort of corker doesn’t pop every day, but, when it does, you’re very glad that you were there to see it. I’ll plow through any number of Alex Balk’s entries about bears if that’s what it takes to read Bustillos’s amazing journalism.

***

You’ll have heard me rattling on about “livings.” I still have an exclusive on this term, unfortunately, but my keen eye for like-minded analysis has spotted a few published parallels, the latest of which is an essay, or rump of an essay, by Slavoj Žižek, in the latest LRB to reach me, “The Revolt of the Salaried Bourgeoisie.” From a Marxian point of view, I gather — I have never begun to understand Marx — “salaried bourgeoisie” is something of an oxymoron; either you’re a worker who receives a salary, or  you’re an owner who receives the profits. The growth of large corporations — Žižek leaves this to inference — leads inevitably to the dwindling number of outright owners and its replacement by armies of individually impotent shareholders.

What’s behind the revolt of the salaried bourgeoisie? Income disparity — it isn’t great enough. This is a fantastic insight. While everyone’s attention is riveted on the widening gap between a handful of extremely wealthy people and the rest of us, nobody’s attending to the real irritant, which is the shrinking of the gap between the bourgeoisie and the working class. This isn’t a matter of less money for lawyers and doctors, but rather one of fewer jobs for people who used to be the equals of lawyers and doctors. Whole classes of middle management have evaporated since the 1970s.

Which is probably what gave me the idea of livings in the first place. The poor have always been with us; what strikes me as a newlypressing problem is the matter of finding occupation for the displaced bourgeoisie. This isn’t tenderness of heart so much as common sense: Žižek cautions against treating the lot of 2011s worldwide uprisings as revolts of the salaried bourgeoisie, but they all seem to have some of that in common, particularly if you consider the role played by college students whose job prospects are dismal.

With Žižek’s final paragraph, I could not agree more heartily.

The proletarianisation of the lower salaried bourgeoisie is matched at the opposite extreme by the irrationally high remuneration of top managers and bankers (irrational since, as investigations have demonstrated in the US, it tends to be inversely proportional to a company’s success). Rather than submit these trends to moralising criticism, we should read them as signs that the capitalist system is no longer capable of self-regulated stability – it threatens, in other words, to run out of control.

***

While we’re on the subject of dandies, how’s this for a pose: when somebody asked me if I favored the Giants or the Patriots yesterday, I blinked. “Baseball, already?” 

When it was over, I said to Ray Soleil that We Need To Talk About Kevin was the most anhedonic movie that I’d ever seen. There was hardly anythink about it to take pleasure in, although, later, when I was thinking about it, I was fairly blown away by Ezra Miller’s performance as Kevin. I said to Ray that I was in no hurry to see Lynne Ramsay’s picture again anytime soon, but I’m not so sure about that, now that I’ve thought about the movie for a day. In fact it woke me up this morning, thinking about Kevin.

Perhaps there are people who can come away from a movie in which a teenager slaughters fellow students — hardly a commonplace in American life, but a few stories go a long and wearisome way — without wondering how the catastrophe could have been avoided, but I’m not one of them, and I think that I’m in the majority. Of those of us who can’t help wondering, some will conclude that the teenager in question was just bad — evil. Others, like me, will go for “troubled,” meaning that someone might have done something to help. I don’t really think that there was any way to save Kevin Khatchadourian, not by the time he got to high school and perfected his archery. But I read the flashback scenes in which his mother was pregnant with him and then responsible for his colicky infancy as evidence or proof or something that Kevin was an unwanted child. There must be lots of unwanted children, and most of them — most of them? — don’t grow up to be murderers, much less angry, functionally sociopathic murderers. But Eva (Tilda Swinton) and her little boy are both very smart, and they’re engaged almost from the start in a contest for control. At one point — Kevin will later tell his mother that this is the only honest thing she ever did — Eva is so provoked by her son’s insolence that, instead of changing his diaper (again!), she throws him against the wall and breaks his arm.

Some people (Ray, for example), will be drawn to the idea that by the time of the arm-breaking incident, Kevin is already lost as a human being, whoever the cause. But he seemed to think — Ray, that is — that you could simply insitutionalize such a child. I think that he’s wrong about that, at least in the United States. There was a time, yes, when “Reform School” was an effective invocation, but it was already a fiction when my parents were frightening me with it. There are very expensive private schools for difficult children, but really bad kids get thrown out of them.

I want to see We Need To Talk About Kevin because I was distracted by thinking that things were going to get worse for Eva — worse than they were at the “beginning,” when her little house by the tracks and her car are splashed with red paint. This is of course the beginning of Eva’s self-inflicted atonement, her refusal to run away to a town where nobody knows her. (You don’t realize until the end how awfully free she is to make this resolution. She thinks that Kevin’s crime is her fault — she has no doubt about it. But in fact things don’t get worse for Eva. She finds a job, keeps it; she scrubs the paint away. She visits Kevin — in a twist, he has not taken his own life, but, in another, he has not stopped at fellow students — every week, and eventually they talk. At the end, Kevin is old enough to be shipped off to a real prison. He’s scared about that. Eva doesn’t think that he’ll be in for very long; being a smart kid, he went on his killing spree days before his sixteenth birthday, and flooded his bloodstream with Prozac. Time’s up on their interview. Kevin gives his motehr a hug, a real, desperate hug. I have to see this movie again.

I will say this: I think that Eva ought to have nixed the archery. No real arrows, at least.

***

What a weekend! It could not have been more bon bourgeois on the outside, quiet and at home. So much for (non-)appearances. In reality, I spent much of yesterday and most of today in a Polish space capsule of how-dumb-am-I humiliation. If there is a moment that I’d like to have preserved on film, it would be the shot of me when I realized that the late Princess Margaret has what in the theatre is called a big speaking part in the finale of Edward St Aubyn’s third “Melrose” novel, Some Hope. Surely she must have died before it was published; she might have sued for libel otherwise, even if every line attributed to her was notarized verbatim. St Aubyn simply skewers her, shifting his polarizing lens between “beastly” and “inane.” The effect is too cumulative for quotation. I haven’t been so shocked since Vile Bodies, which I read as a teenager. St Aubyn one-ups Waugh by replacing the fantastically burlesque with the plausibly ludicrous. 

WHY DID IT TAKE ME SO LONG TO READ THIS BOOK? I’m haunted by the honte of being the last boy on the block. And as if that weren’t bad enough, I saw Truffaut’s La nuit américaine (Day For Night) for the first time. Why? Because, when I was writing up (or down, more likely) Pico Iyer’s book about Graham Greene, and leafing through Shirley Hazzard’s far more vivid book, I came across her mention of scolding Greene for his stiff performance in the movie. He plays an insurance broker who has to tell the director played by Truffaut himself that scenes involving the star (Jean-Pierre Aumont) who has just died in an auto accident cannot be re-shot with another actor; the film will have to be “simplified” to make use of the existing footage. I didn’t think that Greene was bad, really, but, Lordy, hearing his ripe RP accent was a shock. Here’s this “hard case,” sounding like a footman in Buck House. When I mentioned my surprise to Kathleen at dinner, she asked if Damon Runyon spoke like his characters. A point, as Addison DeWitt acknowledged…

Plus the whole weekend’s Timeses and two chapters of The Princess Casamassima plus most of Andrew Pettegree’s chapter about Luther’s impact on the printing business throughout Europe (wildly varied), Season Five of Lewis (sinking me in the conlcusion that nobody but nobody can play Patrick Melrose except Laurence Fox, which you probably regard as a total duh). Plus the regular Saturday tidying (to Lohengrin) and two tasty dinners, not to mention laying the bacon out in the pan last night so that all I had to do this morning, in order to make sure that we were done with breakfast in time for Kathleen to go to Mass, was to turn on the oven. Plus a letter or two, and spending really rather longer than intended on a superb playlist featuring Jessica Molaskey, Jane Monheit, Kurt Elling, Stacey Kent, and a number of other stylish troubadors. Not to mention finally uploading seven of our ten Manhattan Transfer CDs, along with the latest Pink Martini.

Plus.

***

Eg:

“Are you going back to Ireland?” his father asked.

“No, I’ll be in the cottage through August,” said Seamus. The Pegasus Press have asked me to write a short book about the shamanic work.”

“Oh, really,” said Julia. “how fascinating. Are you a shaman yourself?”

[PATRICK/LAURENCE ->] “I had a look at the book that was in the way of my shoes,” said his father, “and some obvious questions spring to mind. Have you spent twenty years being the disciple of a Siberian witch doctor? Have you gathered rare plants under the full moon during the brief summer? Have you been buried alive and died to the world? Have your eyes watered in the smoke of campfires while you muttered prayers to the spirits who might help you to save a dying man? Have you drunk the urine of caribou who have grazed on amanita muscaria and journeyed into other worlds to solve the mystery of a difficult diagnosis? Or did you study in Brazil with the ayabuascaras of the Amazon basin?”

“Well,” said Seamus, “I trained as a nurse with the Irish National Health.”

“I’m sure that was an adequate substitute for being buried alive,” his father said.

It’s wintry cold outside again today, but on Wednesday we had our first taste of spring. I was too old and experienced to take it seriously; I knew that it wouldn’t — and shouldn’t — last. But I wasn’t too old to be quickened. The coming of spring occasions so much bosh that I’m almost as frozen as today’s air by the determination not to spout nonsense, but it really did feel, walking my Wednesday rounds, as if I was appreciably more alive that I’d been. I suppose the balmy afternoon was simply reminding me that this would be true anyway: this week, I finally felt that I had emerged, once and for all, from the mineshaft of grief and rhinovirus in which I’d been immured since November.

Exultation didn’t last. Yesterday, there came a dreadful phone call from the bank. I referred the clerk to Kathleen at the office; Kathleen is our banker. I tried to get hold of her myself, but couldn’t; it was lunchtime, and no one answered. For nearly two hours, I simmered in a miserable anxiety that I wouldn’t wish on anyone. Then came the call from Kathleen, back from lunch. She had sorted the whole business out in two strokes when she received the redirected call and then gone off to lunch. Unaware that the call was redirected — that I knew anything about what did indeed turn out to be 100% clerical error — she never thought to call me beforehand to say that all was well.

I was still pretty rattled at bedtime. You may be asking if Kathleen possesses a mobile phone. The answer is, Sometimes.

To beguile myself during this agony, I turned to a book, to a series of novels in fact, that I’ve been avoiding since I first heard about it a decade or so ago. Every few years, I would read an enthusiastic review of the latest installment in Edward St Aubyn’s sequence of novels about Patrick Melrose, who it seemed was an even more alter-egoish creation than most. I would read that St Aubyn is darkly funny but also just plain dark about his not-so-fictional world of rude and dissolute epigones of the English aristocracy. No reviewer failed to mention child- and drug-abuse. Not for me, I would think, and another few years would go around before the excitement would bubble up again in the otherwise quiet patch of literary life that’s devoted to beautiful English prose.

For some reason, I imagined the writer to be a weedy neurasthenic, a small and petulant person. Perhaps it was the author photograph that ran with the latest round of reviews — the fifth and final novel, At Last, has just been published, and the previous four have been bound up into a convenient omnibus — that changed my mind about these books. I think that the real Edward St Aubyn looks something like Orson Welles, and I’ve found that he writes with something like Welles’s heroic gusto. There is a wealth of polished detail, but no small-mindedness. Opening the book at random, I come upon this passage from Never Mind, the first of the Melrose books. Eleanor is Patrick’s disorganized and deeply unhappy mother, her mind drifting from her own dinner party.

Eleanor thought about her stepfather barking at her mother across the wastes of English silver, French furniture, and Chinese vases that helped to prevent him from becoming physically violent. This dwarfish and impotent French duke had dedicated his life to the idea that civilization had died in 1789. He nevertheless accepted a ten per cent cut from the dealers who sold pre-revolutionary antiques to his wife. He had forced Mary to seell her mother’s Monets and Bonnards on the ground that they were examples of a decadent art that would never really matter. To him, Mary was the least valuable object in the fastidious museums they inhabited, and when eventually he bullied her to death he felt that he had eliminated the last trace of modernity from his life, except, of course, for the enormous income that now came to him from the sales of a dry-cleaning fluid made in Ohio.

It’s almost as though Hemingway had taken up Waugh. Unthinkable, but there it is. Never Mind goes on in this breezy but infernal way right up to the end. By that point, I’d been put out of my ninety minutes of misery, but I was well-primed to flinch and quail at the frightening scenes of substance abuse that take up most of the first half (anyway) of Bad News, the second volume.

He was so tired, he really must get some sleep. Get some sleep. Fold his wings. But what if George and the others sent somebody to look and they found the sick-spattered basin and hammered on the door of the cubicle. Was there no peace, no resting place? Of course there wasn’t. What an absurd question. 

Having put it off for over a week, I finally got on with the end of my Morse jag and watched “The Wench Is Dead,” the penultimate episode, last night. I’d delayed because it’s unusual in several ways at once. It was the first episode that I got to know well — meaning, among many other things, that I had no idea who Adele (Judy Loe) was (the first female interest to reappear in a second episode, that’s who). Written by Malcolm Bradbury, of all people, it’s unlike all the other Morses in involving a very cold case — a murder occurring in 1859. “The Oxford Canal Murder,” it’s called — nothing to do with the University. And there’s a big American part, played by Lisa Eichhorn. As it turns out, Lisa Eichhorn really is American (she was born in upstate New York), but half the time, on Morse, you have to wonder about those accents, which, although plausible, come from what the French call nulle part.

Seeing the show in order, knowing that Morse really was terminally ill, I bawled like a baby and could hardly eat my spaghetti alla carbonara. (Kathleen had a business date.) Lord knows how I’ll carry on during “The Remorseful Day,” the finale in more ways than one. (Not only does Morse actually die, but actor John Thaw himself died two years afterward.)

I thought I would share my Morse Questionnaire. I hope to have forms printed up the next time I go through the series. The database will be amusing.

1. University SOC. (Y/N)
2. Pathologist. (Name)
3. Outremer. (Only two shows leave the British Isles, but “The Wench Is Dead” goes to Ireland.)
4. Canal SOC.
5. Rich and Famous. (Y/N)
6. Tension with the police hierarchy. (1-10, with “Masonic Mysteries,” in which Morse is himself put under arrest, the sole 10.)
7. Lewis’s doubts. (Correlation, 0-1).
8. Crossword Puzzle Clues. (Y/N)
9. Drugs/Alcohol. (Correlation)
10. University off-use. (Summer schools and such)
11. Beaumont. Lonsdale. Gresham. This is actually item 1a.
12. Love Interest. (Name of character, actress; suspect? accomplice? murderer? Victim? All of the above?)
13. Music. (1-10, with “Twilight of the Gods” and “The Death of the Self” the two 10s.)
14. Does the chief superintendant insult Morse by calling him “matey.” (Y/N)

If you can think of anything to add to this questionnaire, please let me know! 

If I were younger, I’d let myself be annoyed by Pico Iyer’s stab at memoir, The Man Within My Head. But I’m older, and it is no longer necessary to couple a lack of sympathy with a show of impatience. I picked up the book because I wanted to know who Pico Iyer is. I’ve been reading his pieces in the NYRB for ages, and I’ve wondered about his name and where he comes from. I didn’t recognize “Iyer” as the Tamil Brahmin surname that it apparently is. Now I know. As to how somebody of such lineage came to be named after a Florentine humanist, that’s an unusual story but it is plausible enough. (Anyway, his real first name is “Siddhartha,” no?) Pinning down Iyer’s roots seemed all the more important to me as his topics were far-flung, a globe-trotter’s in fact. What I didn’t know, until I was well into The Man Within My Head, is that the author worked for a decade or so, in exalted positions, at Time Magazine. When I learned that, the lack of sympathy that I’d been feeling as one well-written page followed another became perfectly explicable.

I can’t say much about Time; only that, like New York and, lately, The Economist, it was a publication that I wouldn’t allow in the house. New York is openly trivial, but, like The Economist, Time is a magazine in which good writing is deployed with the aim of preventing the reader from doing any real thinking.

You could say that he gained from school not just his schoolboy’s sense of adventure, his love of mischief, his uncertainty about what to do with the most foreign country of all (the other sex), but his almost superstitious revulsion from success.

I would argue that this sentence, in which “he” is Graham Greene, the eponymous man within Iyer’s head — or at least one of them, the other, possibly, being his father (he waits forever to raise this question) — is the key to the book. To write of women as “the most foreign country of all” is almost as clever as it is thoughtless. The summing up of the things that Greene learned in school reminds me of that notorious remark of John Ashbery (in a conversation with Kenneth Koch):

I am assuming that from the moment that life cannot be one continual orgasm, real happiness is impossible and pleasant surprise is promoted to the front rank of the emotions.

It seems that some people are simply wired that way — how sorry one is for them. Not that Iyer is at all like Graham Greene. He appears to have led a level, satisfying interior life with lots of exterior excitement. He writes of Greene as perpetually escaping the past; Iyer is always looking for new possibilities. His restlessness is the consequence of rootlessness — it’s the kind of freedom that Marilynne Robinson has in mind when she talks about the advantages of being a “deracinated” Westerner.

That’s what would be annoying about The Man Within My Head, if I were immature enough to let annoyance cloud the real pleasure that I took in Pico Iyer’s exotic but wholesome company (a pleasure dependent upon my invisibility as his reader). Iyer is bewitched, if only to a manageable degree, by “Graham Greene.” A writer and a man who, despite many personal failings, seemed to strike everyone who knew him as remarkable. Iyer, who grew up — well, that’s just it: he grew up flying back and forth between Oxford and Santa Barbara. When he was nine years old, and newly transplanted to California, he not only got homesick for England but figured out in currency-exchange calculations that it would be cheaper for him to return to his prep school and fly home for vacations than to pack his lunchbox every day for the American public school. Whether his parents proved these numbers to their own satisfaction, they acceded to his request, and Iyer became one super-cool kid, always and everywhere an ambassador from a highly intriguing elsewhere. (After all, he could have shuttled between Tulsa and Athens, say — two places with little curiosity about the other.)

In short: if Graham Greene had taken up residence inside Pico Iyer’s head, then he must have found there the peace that he sought in vain throughout his life. I suspect that what inspired Iyer to write this book was the allure of borrowing a measure of Greene’s troubles, with a view to complicating his own worldliness. But the graft doesn’t take, and, despite the intensity of his engagement with The Quiet American, which he can appreciate deeply from both sides, Fowler’s and Pyle’s, Iyer cannot contain Greene, much less house him in his head. It would have been much better to approach Greene’s as the life that Iyer was, through luck and constitution, spared.

All right: here’s what’s unpardonably annoying about The Man Within My Head: the refusal to name “Eton College,” at least until the very end of the book, when we see that Iyer has saved it up for a joke — he has been holding it back so that it can be mentioned for the first time by the Bishop of Potosí, of all people, in the most unlikely circumstances. The joke is not very funny, and it does not dispel the annoyance piled up by a string of references — our distant patron Henry VI; the book that Cyril Connolly wrote about our school; between Slough and Windsor; New Buildings/oldest classroom in the world; eighteen prime ministers and the nineteenth taking office as I write — that act as shibboleths, designed to distinguish the sophisticated from the parochial. It seems almost rude. I was never for a moment mystified; I saw through each hint as it appeared. But I drew no satisfaction from this knowingness; quite the reverse. I was embarrassed; I felt like a know-it-all.

Grahame Greene, of course, did not attend Eton. His father was housemaster and eventually headmaster at Berkhamsted School, in an outer suburb of London. Greene took a second-class degree in history from Balliol and then jumped into journalism, from which the success of his fourth novel, Stamboul Train, delivered him for life. He married and had two children but did not live with his family. He had amazingly clear eyes. If you’re interested in his elusive charm, captured by a great writer who spent time with him over many years, by all means seek out Shirley Hazzard’s Greene on Capri, a book that I think it’s slightly churlish of Pico Iyer not to mention.

Don’t do what I did. When you get round to this week’s New Yorker, read the story about the successful musician second, after the story about the unhappy one. Jeremy Denk, writing with the most amiable brio in the world about recording a work that he plays, as he himself says, with the fervor of a gospel preacher, Charles Ives’s fractal Concord Sonata, will take your mind off the madly brief career of a young violinist who was apparently a better musician than he thought he was.

Ian Parker tells “The Story of a Suicide” with such insistent comprehensiveness that it reads like the masterpiece that would conclude an apprenticeship to Janet Malcolm. You may recall the tragedy that appears to have occurred at Rutgers University about fifteen months ago, but you will find, as you read Parker’s piece, that what you remember about it didn’t take place. Most notoriously, Dharun Ravi did not post a video on YouTube, or anywhere else, of his roommate, Tyler Clementi, making out with another man. Nor was Clementi unaware of what Ravi was doing. The fact that Clementi took his own life, by jumping off the George Washington Bridge, a few days after Ravi’s second attempt to spy on him — a move that Clementi himself thwarted by powering down Ravi’s computer before his lover arrived in the room — may have had something to do with a conversation between the roommates that we have no record of, but, the better you get ot know Clementi, the less the foolishness with the Webcam looks like a proximate cause of his suicide. His death is very sad, but it is, even more sadly, not the end of the story, because Dharun Ravi now faces not only a stiff prison sentence but the prospect of deportation (he was born in India). Like Janet Malcolm’s Iphigenia in Forest Hills, this wouldn’t be the story that it is without the commitment of bloody-minded and media-stimulated officials commited to a miscarriage of justice.

If prosecutors had been able to charge Ravi with shiftiness and bad faith — if the criminal law exactly reflected common moral judgments about kindness and reliability — then to convict him would be easy. The long indictment against Ravi can be seen as a kind of regretful commentary about the absence of such statutes. Similarly, the enduring false belief that Ravi was responsible for outing Tyler Clementi, and for putting a sex tape on the Internet, can be seen as a collective effort to balance a terrible event with a terrible cause.

In other words, there is little or nothing to prosecute here.

There is a great deal more to this story, and, now that I know as much as I do, I want to know the rest. Specifically, I want to know more about a 25 year-old man known hitherto only as “M B.” He was Tyler Clementi’s companion in the two trysts in the Rutgers dormitory that took place before Clementi killed himself. M B was not a Rutgers student; students who saw him were put off by his not looking like someone who belonged on campus. He may or may not be able to tell us something more about Tyler Clementi’s state of mind in response to what appears to have been a dangerously rapid conclusion to his belated puberty. As we follow the copious spoor of tweets and chats that Parker has reassembled (as well as more conventional conversations with Clementi’s parents), we watch a very shy young man undergo two critical developments. First, right before heading off to his freshmen year of college, he comes out to his family, a disclosure made more troubling by his mother’s attachment to an evangelical church. Then, he tries on full-blown manhood by going out to find someone to have sex with and bringing this person back to his bed. I for one had the feeling that Tyler took on too much too fast, and also that he had no choice about doing so.  Having no friends at the new school was probably his fatal vulnerability. The tomfooleries of Dharun Ravi and his old friend and fortuitous dorm neighbor, Molly Wei would have annoying at worst. You almost wish that Tyler had been more outraged about them. Having reported the spying to the residential assistant, Tyler appears to have moved on, on his pre-set course to suicide. It is not reaching too far to suppose that Tyler knew that his own death would exact a terrible revenge, by transforming an ugly prank into one with a plausibly lethal one.

The Rutgers story also brings increased clarity to my conviction that most college students would benefit by take a gap year or two after high school. By “most college students” I mean the students at most colleges. I’m not saying that every young man and woman who gets into Princeton is emotionally equipped for the challenge. But students at Rutgers carry an additional burden, a lack of academic focus, perhaps, or strained financial resources at home, a something or other that effectively prevented them from competing for more prestigious admissions. As a state university, Rutgers is more an amalgamation of institutions than a cohesive school, and to many students it offers professional training, not scholarly speculation. Everything suggests that what a university such as Rutgers requires in lieu of academic rigor is psychosocial maturity — a characteristic possessed by neither of the roommates in this case. My heart goes out to their parents — and then I want to smack their parents for having hurled their children into an abyss. How can they not have known that their sons weren’t ready to leave home? Social pressure undoubtedly accounts for their blindness, or their determination to overlook what they could see. That’s why gap years ought to be mandatory. Parents generally make a hash of the precocity of children, and they ought to be prevented from boasting that their brilliant darling has been admitted to the University of Chicago at the age of fifteen.  

¶ Jonathan Lehrer: “If the sport of football ever dies, it will die from the outside in.” High school students, whose brains are still growing, will withdraw from the game as the risk of concussion is ever more frankly addressed. Don’t expect helmets to help. (Grantland; via The Browser; 1/11) ¶ Philip Kitcher lays out a “Darwinian” approach to ethics: “a human phenomenon, permanently unfinished.” But none the less stable for that. We applaud. (Berfrois; via The Browser; 1/13) ¶ Thomas Rogers interviews Hanne Blank about Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality. Briefly, Blank agrees with Cynthia Nixon, that preference is a preference. (Salon; via The Morning News; 1/24) ¶ After the initial bewilderment — for whom, exactly, is Caitlin Flanagan writing? — Maria Bustillos and David Roth consider the matter from the hubbie angle: Rob Hudnut, “Mr Flanagan,” writes Barbie specials. There you go! (The Awl; 1/25) ¶ Exorcizing the Wicked Witch of “Maybe It Will Come In Handy Someday“: Cara Kitagawa-Sellers and Doug Sellers discuss the agony of breaking the spell. (GOOD; 1/27) ¶ Historiann teaches a pilot course in American sexuality 1492-2011; students find the history depressing rather than sexy. (1/30)

¶ While we heartily agree with Amar Bhidé that what the world needs now is lots of “boring banks,” we agree even more strongly with Felix Salmon that unlimited deposit insurance would be a dim move. “If you guarantee everything, you guarantee nothing.” (NYT; 1/5) ¶ Crisis of capitalism? Nonsense, says Nige: we’re experiencing the death of (soft) socialism. (Nigeness; 1/11)

By soft socialism I mean the kind that takes money from taxpayers and spends it in a well-intentioned (and at times quite successful) attempt to make the world a better place. Then – because there’s no natural end to this project – it runs out of money, so it starts borrowing, then borrowing more, until it’s borrowing simply to service its ever-increasing debts, and eventually it runs out of road.

¶ At Dissent, Steve Fraser identifies the weak spot in Jeff Madrick’s generally masterful account of The Age of Greed: faith in the New Deal. “It is strange that progressives should become a party of the past, preoccupied with the restoration of American capitalism’s golden age. It is not an inspiring vision for those seeking a way out of this killing impasse.” (via 3 Quarks Daily) ¶ And while we’re on the topic of malignant capitalism, consider Ingrid Rowland’s commentary on the Costa Concordia disaster, which may have originated in bad ideas at corporate headquarters. (NYRBlog; 1/24) ¶ You can talk about job creation as much as you like, but the simple truth is that capitalists hate to hire people. (Felix Salmon; 1/30) ¶ Chris Whalen has set up a hedge fund, Tangent Capital Partners, that will vindicate, he believes, his faith in small, traditional banks, and his conviction that the big Wall Street banks are destined to be broken up. “We don’t need to have these behemoths. It’s just a total fallacy.” When Mr Whalen was growing up, Paul Volcker was a friend of the family. (NYT)

¶ Cory Robin discusses The Conservative Mind with Philip Pilkington, in two parts, at Naked Capitalism. The second part begins with an interesting attempt to get to the bottom of the craziness that is Ayn Rand’s popularity.  (1/13) ¶ Worth looking into: Clay Johnson’s The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption. Maria Popova is good enough to quote Johnson’s dismantling of the nonsense term, “information overload.” (Brain Pickings; 1/19)

¶ Reviewing Jody Kantor’s book about the Obamas, David Remnick reminds us of something about the White House that the president and his wife appear to have forgotten: “The Presidency is not a career.” (New Yorker; 1/10)

While Kantor seems, on the whole, quite admiring of the Obamas, she also cites their moments of self-pity—Obama has said that he can hardly wait to begin his life as an ex-President—which sit awkwardly with their tremendous good fortune. The Obamas (particularly Michelle) grew up in modest circumstances, but they come out of a collection of privileged institutions: Punahou School, Occidental, Columbia, Princeton, Harvard Law School; their daughters are healthy and bright, students at the Chicago Lab Schools and, now, Sidwell Friends. All the talk of lost privacy, the difficulty of living in the White House, the yearning for the normalcy of Hyde Park—we read it in “The Obamas” and have read it many times before—is understandable but also a little unseemly. The Presidency is not a career. Nor is it a component piece in a greater picture of familial contentment. It is an unimaginably demanding mission that inevitably exacts a toll. To carry it out, a President is going to miss some dinners, acquire wrinkles, gray hair, and worse. But we don’t want to hear complaints. We prefer our warriors happy.

¶ The admissions process at Cambridge University (Churchill College in particular) comes across, in Jeevan Vasegar’s account, as harder on the staff than on the applicants. The essay also offers an interesting summary of Britain’s version of Affirmative Action. (Guardian; via The Morning News; 1/11) ¶ Maria Bustillos launches one of her bazookas at the idea of “value-added” teacher-testing. “What is glaringly obvious to those of us who’ve actually spent some time in schools is that teachers in this country are already hamstrung by excessive testing requirements and all the rest of the crazy demands of a Kafkaesque bureaucracy that does our students far more harm than good.” (The Awl; 1/17) ¶ Ha! We always thought so. Scout’s mail bag has fewer holes than the New York Film Academy’s curriculum. (1/19)

¶ At TLS, John Barrell gives a new book about Vauxhall Gardens, London’s famed pleasure grounds for over a century, an extremely informative review. (via 3 Quarks Daily; 1/24)

¶ Steve Inskeep on Pakistan: “I wanted to capture a picture of a country that is not necessarily at war with the United States, but is at war with itself.” (Guernica; via 3 Quarks Daily; 1/10)

¶ At n + 1, Cary Sernovitz appraises Mike Daisey’s monologue, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, and comes away determined, if nothing else, to deny the late manufacturer an Artists’s Exemption. Greediness has nothing to do with innovation. (via 3 Quarks Daily; 1/4) ¶ The misanthropy of Paul Kingsnorth’s ecocentricism is not explicit; we’re not sure that the environmentalist sees it himself. While we agree that human beings have done a lot of damage to Planet Earth in recent decades, we stop short of scolding; you can’t misbehave unless you know any better, and society-averse writers like Kingsnorth have absolutely nothing to tell you about behaving better as a social animal. (Orion; via The Browser; 1/5) ¶ Soon to be a major motion picture: Robert Harris’s The Fear Index, which Felix Salmon praises as the first realistic high-finance novel that he has ever seen. (1/17)

¶ Madison Smartt Bell arrived in New York (from Tennessee via Princeton) in 1979, and in “Writing the City” he reminds of the literary landscape that reflected the gritty actual one. (The Millions; 1/11)

¶ How Edward Burns made his latest movie, Newlyweds, for $9000, and brought it to your house for you to watch whenever. (Speakeasy; 1/14) ¶ Virginia Postrel is disappointed by The Iron Lady — she doesn’t find it particularly feminist; rather the reverse — and she decries the new Hollywood Code, which “declares that one’s worth depends on personal relationships, not public actions, and that sacrificing family time for the sake of achievement is nothing but short-sighted selfishness.” (Bloomberg; via The Browser; 1/17) ¶ At HTMLGiant, A D Jameson asks, first, “How Many Movies Are There?” — an infinitude, he concludes — and then, somewhat more intriguingly, “How Many Movies Have You Seen?” He estimates that he has seen .7% of the total. (1/17) ¶ Andrew Dickson looks into the current popularity, in Britain, of Jacobean revenge tragedies. He never mentions “snark,” but isn’t that what it comes down to? (Guardian; via Arts Journal; 1/25) ¶ The Epicurean Dealmaker views Margin Call; thumbs up. (1/26) ¶ David Cronenberg talks about his career, raising money and writing scripts and being amazed that you could make a movie in Toronto. (LARB; via MetaFilter; 1/30)

¶ Luke Epplin considers butter a “sauce.” Luke hates all sauces. He is a Food Plainist. (The Bygone Bureau; 1/17) ¶ There’s nothing like a “simple and basic” recipe for weeknight cooking that’s published at The Awl. This week: pasta sauce. We recommend Brian Pritchett’s method highly. (1/25)

¶ Drew Demavich takes a closer look at Thomas Kinkade’s calendar for 2012 and discovers one of America’s most important conceptual artists! (The Awl; 1/23)

¶ V X Sterne, happily for him, doesn’t know how right he is about private jets. We know. (Outer Life; 1/4) ¶ The fun thing to do with “David Shapiro’s” account of DJing a New Year’s Eve party for “one of the richest men in America,” in a Lower East Side basement, is to imagine Evelyn Waugh’s version. More arrests, certainly! (The Awl; 1/5) ¶ Salon editor Sarah Hepola has an unpleasant experience at a Barnes & Noble in Dallas. We think she handled it well. (via The Morning News; 1/10)  ¶ Jonathan Gourlay, whose return from Micronesia remains indefinite, encounters a woman who was “ready to die.” (Maybe she saw Facebook coming.) (The Bygone Bureau; 1/30)

Have a Look: ¶ In the middle of a recession, what’s an architect to do? Design for fairy tales,  of course! Maria Popova finds plans for Baba Yaga’s hut, Jack’s beanstalk, and (our favorite) Rapunzel’s tower. (Brain Pickings; 1/5) ¶ Jeff Harris: A series of daily self-portraits 12 years long, uninterrupted by cancer. (Time; via MetaFilter; 1/9) ¶ Scout discovers an Adirondack chalet with a secret — a nine-storey missile silo. Where’s Hitch when you need him? (1/11) ¶ Superb fun: Doodling in Math Class @ Brainiac (1/13) ¶ Maria Popova discovers Scrap Irony. (Brain Pickings; 1/19)

Noted: ¶ “Don’t Be A Di*k During Meals With Friends.” We strongly endorse the playing of this game. (Blk.Grl.Blogging; via The Morning News; 1/5) ¶ Regretsy. (via Discoblog; 1/9) ¶ Jim Emerson’s Desert Island DVDs. (Scanners; 10/10) ¶ Where the “ivy” comes from in “Blue Ivy.” (Speakeasy) ¶ Geoff Manaugh revisits (the loss of) the Guggenheim silver, in Arthur Kill in 1903. (BLDGBLOG; 1/11) ¶ Sarah Weinman makes the case for Penelope Gilliatt. (Slate; via Arts Journal; 1/17) ¶ A Few Things That Andrew James Weatherhead Likes More Than Commenting On The Internet. (HTMLGiant; 1/23) ¶ Captain Schettino and “the Birkenhead Drill.” (Brainiac) ¶ Grey’s Misconception Rundown. (1/24) ¶ Daniel Orozco’s Orientation. (The Millions) ¶ Bikes on the subway. (The Awl; 1/30)

Now, if I’d only finished the chapter on altruism in Marilynne Robinson’s Absence of Mind before writing about it, I’d have been able to answer my own questions, posed at the end of yesterday’s Weekend Note. Robinson’s target is “that essential modernist position, that our minds are not our own.” Ah. That’s what she meant by “the exclusion of the felt life of the mind.” Also, if I’d gone on reading, I’d have encountered her astonishingly entertaining argument that what can’t be explained by natural selection can be explained by meme theory — not that she has much use for either.

She’s quite right about “that essential modernist position.” It’s the core of the bossiest school of thought in Western history. By comparison, the orthodoxy of medieval Christianity is essentially permissive: what it permits, and what modernism denies, is responsibility of knowing your own mind. Modernists, control freaks each and every one of them, insist that it’s precisely your (silly) ideas that stand between poverty and utopia. If you would only listen to them!

Still, I wonder, to borrow an uncongenial phrase, if I have a dog in this fight — this fight over the soul between thinkers like Steven Pinker and Marilynne Robinson.

Steven Pinker says, “The faculty with which we ponder the world has no ability to peer inside itself or our other faculties to see what makes them tick. That makes us the victims of an illusion: that our own psychology comes from some divine force or mysterious essence or almighty principle.” But the mind, or the brain, a part of the body just as Wilson says it is, is deeply sensitive to itself. Guilt, nostalgia, the pleasure or anticipation, even the shock of a realization, all arise out of an event that occurs entirely in the mind or brain, and they are as potent as other sensations.

Aside from a strong but not entirely coherent feeling that Pinker and Robinson are talking about apples and oranges here — to put it more fairly, Pinker is talking apples and Robinson is throwing oranges at him — I’m not sure that I care which one of them is right, or if either of them is. I have never been the “victim of an illusion” about God. When I was a child, I believed in hell, all right; it seemed like the natural continuation of the incredible tedium of everyday life. God as represented was not a figure with whom I wanted to spend much time; Jesus even less. There was nothing interesting or attractive about the religious experience for me. (The interest and attraction of religious display is another story!)

I think that it’s impertinent to say that I don’t know anything about God, and I don’t think that anyone else does, either. Even when think such things, as Mrs Clancy says, we don’t say them. What I would say is that I don’t know why anyone wants to believe in God, or draws any satisfaction from belief. Of course I’ve heard all my life about the comfort in affliction that religion provides, and I have to assume that, even though I never felt it — I have been lucky enough to know few genuine afflictions — other people really do, and that the feeling is not an illusion — as Robinson insists, it’s a mental, mindful fact. But I don’t understand it from the inside at all.

It’s a wonder I have the nerve to stand up here and write anything at all, given that I’m unresponsive to the two most powerful forces in contemporary society, religion and sport. Then again, I live in a world in which The Artist, since it opened last year, has brought in less than a third of the box office receipts garnered by The Grey in its first weekend. 

Last night, I watched Eric Civanyan’s Il ne faut jurer de rien (Never Say Never: 2005), an adaptation of a play by Alfred de Musset starring Gérard Jugnot, Mélanie Doutey, and Jean Dujardin. Set in 1830, during the “revolution” that sent Charles X packing and put his cousin Louis-Philippe on a more parliamentary throne, the story is a daffy farce in which a wealthy department-store owner determines to marry his ne’er-do-well nephew to a spirited but penniless baroness. It’s hard to believe that I’ve only seen M Jugnot, whose face has the knack of becoming instantly familier, in two other pictures, Les choristes and Faubourg 36, but there it is. Mlle Doutey is not just another pretty face; she has something of Annette Bening’s fierceness. Jean Dujardin plays the nephew.

M Dujardin is obviously a great comedian. Whether he is also a great actor is harder to tell, because, even more than a comedian, he is a great movie star. This makes the great-actor question irrelevant. It is obvious to me, on the basis of Il ne faut jurer de rien and OSS 117: Le Caire, nid d’espions that The Artist was made as a showcase for Jean Dujardin’s talent, and to remind the world what a great movie star is like: a face and a (fully clothed) body capable of sustaining interest in a very familiar story without saying a word. Without M Dujardin, The Artist would be an amusing stunt, a French movie made entirely in and around Los Angeles, mashing up a passel of Hollywood chestnuts into what one Internet wag has called A Star Is Born Singin’ In the Rain on Sunset Boulevard.

Instead of being a stunt, The Artist is the study of a face. It’s an incredibly interesting face, Jean Dujardin’s, because it is very hard to pin down. What does it really look like? I don’t know how this works, exactly, but sometimes it is the mouth that you notice, and sometimes the nose (especially in profile, naturally). Then there is that smile, which is simply the biggest smile ever flashed for a camera; if it were any bigger, you could see it standing behind the man. He can narrow his eyes in steely cruelty or open them wide in ingenuous, almost idiotic delight. And what a difference a pencil moustache makes! His trademark look is possibly the one that he makes in the outgoing credits of OSS 117: affably smiling with uncertain, not-quite-clueless eyebrows. Possibly. I’ve only seen three movies, and Jean Durjardin turns 40 in June.

And here I thought I was up on current French cinema.

***

I’ve just returned from a quick trip to Fairway. It would have been quicker at almost any other time; Sunday afternoon and early evening are said to be the store’s busiest hours.  I’m still amazed by the people who seem to think that they’re standing in a quaint rural grocery store, and not in a stream of human traffic that makes the city’s busiest subway stations look underused. The people who, for example, stand alongside their shopping carts, double parking as it were. I don’t mind it so much, because I’m a big guy. I can see over everybody’s head. Kathleen would feel horribly pinned. The elevators remain a challenge. I have taken to choosing one, standing nearby, and waiting for it to arrive.

If our branch of Fairway seems poorly designed, it’s hard to imagine any improvements, but there’s one thing that I would have done differently . Where is it written that fruit and vegetables are the first things that shoppers want to see? I should think they’d be among the last, and one of the things that I like best about our Gristede’s, across the street, is that produce is tucked into an alcove that you don’t have to pass through. At Fairway, I would trade produce upstairs for the bakery and dairy sections downstairs, effectively rendering the street level a convenience store.

All the while I was pushing my cart through the throng — my guilty contribution to the store’s chaos was the lazy decision to use a cart, when everything on my list wouldn’t have filled a hand basket — I was thinking about Marilynne Robinson growing up in the West — in northern Idaho. There’s an article about this in the new issue of Bookforum, a review of a collection of Robinson’s essays by Charles Petersen, who also grew up out there. He quotes a line from the title essay, “When I Was a Child I Read Books.”

I find that the hardest work in the world — it may in fact be impossible — is to persuade Easterners that growing up in the West is not intellectually crippling.

She wouldn’t have any trouble persuading me. I grew up in an intellectually stunting Westchester suburb, a haven of WASP purity that scowled handsomely at anything not involving a ball. I’d have thought that growing up in the West was socially crippling, though. After all, I could escape Bronxville on day trips to Manhattan, at least from the age of 12, which is about when my intellect kicked in. Where do you go in the West? You make the most of the solitude, I suppose. I don’t care for solitude as such. I spend the vast bulk of every day by myself, but I’m too busy to register the solitariness of my hours. When I’m not working, I don’t want to be alone. I love walking out into the almost always crowded street. It’s like a drink of clear cool water. Only rarely do I see anyone I know, so you could say that my solitude follows me outdoors. But I would much rather be alone in a rush of New Yorkers heading every which way for every imaginable purpose than sit by myself on the bank of a woodland stream. And I am always hoping that someone will ask me for directions.

I’ve been working hard at reading Marilynne Robinson’s Terry Lectures, Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness From the Modern Myth of the Self. I know that its an argument against the presumptions of secular godlessness, and I enjoy seeing them treated as presumptions. But I don’t know what Robinson would put in their place, beyond a good-natured piety, a sense of stewardship for the things of the world. I’ve got that, but I sense that there’s more. What I really want to know is how Robinson feels about the notion that some people have of being able to speak for God, on the authority of Scripture or some even more intimate contact. In the second lecture, “The Strange History of Altruism,” she writes,

Assuming that there is indeed a modern malaise, one contributing factor might be the exclusion of the felt life of the mind from the accounts of reality proposed by the oddly authoritative and deeply influential parascientific literature that has long associated itself with intellectual progress, and the exclusion of felt life from the varieties of thought and art that reflect the influence of these accounts.

What is she talking about, “the exclusion of the felt life of the mind”? I’m not aware of the “felt life of the mind” being an inadmissible topic, and I have no idea what the “varieties of thought and art that reflect” the exluding proposals look like. (Maybe I don’t think that art that seems to deny or to minimize humanity to be art at all.) Robinson’s tone is argumentative in a way that leaves me wondering if I’ve missed something. As undoubtedly I have, what with growing up in the intellectually crippling conditions the Holy Square Mile.