Dwight Garner has a lot of fun playing with the latest nonsense from Timothy Ferriss.

Here’s a better analogy: “The 4-Hour Body” reads as if The New England Journal of Medicine had been hijacked by the editors of the SkyMall catalog. Some of this junk might actually work, but you’re going to be embarrassed doing it or admitting to your friends that you’re trying it. This is a man who, after all, weighs his own feces, likes bloodletting as a life-extension strategy and aims a Philips goLite at his body in place of ingesting caffeine.

As befits the former chief executive of a nutritional supplements company, Mr. Ferriss talks up a witches’ brew of juices, nuts, potions and drugs. Here’s a typical burp from an early chapter: “Overfat? Try timed protein and pre-meal lemon juice. Undermuscled? Try ginger and sauerkraut. Can’t sleep? Try upping your saturated fat or using cold exposure.”

Want to have “wolverine” sex? Who doesn’t? Eat 4 Brazil nuts, 20 raw almonds and 2 capsules of fermented cod-liver oil and butterfat four hours before intercourse. Mr. Ferriss used a hormone-slash-drug called human chorionic gonadotropin and more than tripled his semen volume. “Happy days,” he writes.

Giving new meaning to the phrase, “a man of parts.” Or, better: not.

The city is going white once more, but this time, one expects, without the pileup. Not that we were inconvenienced in the slightest by the post-Christmas dump. It wasn’t until the beginning of this week that I noticed the ramparts of garbage bags that lined most streets. Most of them are gone by now, too.

I woke up with a cold. How serious a cold remains to be sneezed. I was tired all week. Thinking that perhaps I was no longer equal to my holiday bibulousness, I cut back night after night, but to no avail; the mornings, once I was up, I always felt headachy and listless. This malaise would pass during the afternoon. Yesterday afternoon I spent on my feet, alternately preparing dinner and playing with the new shredder.

We have never thought it necessary to keep a shredder at home, but two weeks ago I discovered a pile of fat folders stuffed with all of our monthly billing records from 2000 and 2001, plus credit-card account statements reaching back into the Nineties. Tossing the papers down the chute, with identifying information on every page, seemed rash. So I went over to Staples on Lexington Avenue and bought the cheapest shredder on offer. I bought the cheapest shredder because it was also the smallest; I couldn’t imagine how I would house the ordinary run of units, which ranged from medium wastebasket to clothes hamper in size. The smallest shredder is not the most efficient; its bin has to be emptied constantly, and it quickly overheats. But it will fit in the hall closet in its box (which makes a great temporary wastebasket for the shreds). I don’t expect to use it very often. But I kept it busy all afternoon yesterday — what with all the cooling-down periods.

Trying to decide how to spend the day in bed, I’ve settled on finishing Sarah Bakewell’s How to Live: or, a Life of Montaigne. This was, to my mind, the best book of 2010, and I can’t imagine being a blogger and not finding it of the greatest interest. Montaigne’s textual remains would be far easier to sort out if he had been writing in the digital age; as it is, his Essays would be a vast untraceable palimpsest if had had had a mind to correct what he wrote. Instead, he was happy to add to it, more the doubling the length of his original collection in a bit more than ten years. He left two “final” drafts when he died, and disagreements between them have generated ongoing contentions between proponents of what’s called the “Bordeaux Copy” and of the edition published by Marie de Gournay in 1595. (The recent Pléiade edition, Bakewell tells us, reverts to the long-deprecated 1595 publication.)

Sarah Bakewell’s book is a delight because she tells us how Montaigne wrote, how he lived, and not what he thought. If you want to know what Montaigne thought, there is no reason to read anything but the Essays themselves; and you will do well to avoid simplifying explanations by other hands. Montaigne is an invaluable writer because he captures the ever-shifting appearance of life as we live it; he is not interested in rigorous principles, seeing them for the reductions that they are. As a result, Montaigne does not make sense. His sentences are always intelligible, but his chapters are not; sometimes it is not clear what he is really talking about. Comparing the first edition to the later ones, Bakewell hits on extremely apt imagery.

It filled only two fairly small volumes and, although the “Apology” was already outsized, most chapters remained relatively simple. The often oscillated between rival points of view, but they did not wash around like vast turbulent rivers or fan out into deltas, as later essays did.

Montaigne’s texts may be messy, but they are prodigiously fertile.

Taking breaks from How to Live, I’ve tidied up the apartment from last night’s rout and fixed myself a small sandwich: sliced tenderloin, red onion, and Swiss with mayonnaise on a dinner roll. If I’d bagged the leftover rolls last night, it would be heaven, or at least quite a bit less crumbly. I’m thinking of making a loaf of bread with dinner-roll dough.

Matt Bai argues that the appointment of William Daley as White House Chief of Staff, while certainly a confirmation of the Administration’s centrist sympathies, also signals a shift from low deal-making to high politicking

In the same way, Mr. Sperling, unlike the less-than-diplomatic Mr. Summers, is known to be politically sophisticated, a policy nerd with long experience as an adviser to Democratic politicians going back to Mario M. Cuomo. His advice to the president will be informed not just by economic theory but also by a sense of what can sway voters and how.

What these appointments suggest is that Mr. Obama is now readying himself for an extended public campaign — or, rather, for two of them. The first begins now, as the president tries to recast himself as a reformer beholden to neither party, a grownup parrying the partisan thrusts of pettier adversaries.

The second will kick in soon enough, as Mr. Obama looks toward 2012 in hopes of becoming only the second Democratic president since Franklin D. Roosevelt to be elected twice. The other, of course, was Mr. Clinton

We hope that more liberal supporters of the Democratic Party will, instead of carping as they did through the Nineties, find a more constructive outlet for their energies than complaining that the President has betrayed them.

Stories about people with miles of empty bookshelves that need to be stocked by designers have been known to make us laugh and cry at the same time. This one, by Penelope Green, almost reached a satisfactory solution of the content/object problem that books have posed ever since rich people paid illuminators.

Mr. Wine, who is more of a library artist than a mere book dealer, and who can swathe a book in just about anything, had fun last month wrapping the autobiographies of Keith Richards and Jay-Z in old-fashioned red leather. It’s a practice that irritates book designers like Chip Kidd, who creates noted covers for Knopf.

“It feels sort of needlessly complicated, like turning on the vacuum cleaner and going and finding a piece of dirt,” Mr. Kidd said. “You don’t have to redesign the jacket; the jackets have been designed. This feels arbitrary, like taking a piece of wood and wrapping it in paper.”

The next paragraph, instead of lurching off into Restoration Hardware’s much-mocked “book bundle,” ought to have taken us to libraries composed of  books designed by Chip Kidd. There must be a few them about somewhere.

We resorted to Wikipedia for a better understanding of null hypotheses and Bayesian analysis — ours could hardly be worse — but we still don’t grasp the objections to the publication of Daryl Bem’s ESP research in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. We agree with the critics that Dr Bem’s experiments are probably unsound, and that the journal’s publishers can’t be unaware of the likely uptick in sales (a null hypothesis?). But is it a disgrace? We can’t say.

Many statisticians say that conventional social-science techniques for analyzing data make an assumption that is disingenuous and ultimately self-deceiving: that researchers know nothing about the probability of the so-called null hypothesis.

In this case, the null hypothesis would be that ESP does not exist. Refusing to give that hypothesis weight makes no sense, these experts say; if ESP exists, why aren’t people getting rich by reliably predicting the movement of the stock market or the outcome of football games?

Instead, these statisticians prefer a technique called Bayesian analysis, which seeks to determine whether the outcome of a particular experiment “changes the odds that a hypothesis is true,” in the words of Jeffrey N. Rouder, a psychologist at the University of Missouri who, with Richard D. Morey of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, has also submitted a critique of Dr. Bem’s paper to the journal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s because it is a murder mystery.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You might think, from recent entries, at I’ve been doing nothing but reading The Kindly Ones and other earnest books, but I’ve had a few nights out in the past weeks.

The second Orpheus Carnegie Hall concert of the season featured the stunning British soprano Kate Royal. Ms Royal sang Britten’s Les Illuminations, a song cycle, set to Rimbaud, that gives the composer’s countrywomen a chance to show off their Continental chops. After what struck me as an uncertain beginning, Ms Royal’s voice bloomed into the music, but when a beautiful woman sings “Being Beauteous” beautifully, it is hard to say where artistry stops and good luck begins. A beautiful young woman, I should say; time will settle the mystery. My companion and I, old school gents, felt that a slip ought to have been worn beneath the clinging white satin gown over which the singer seemed always about to trip. (If wardrobe is going to malfunction, let’s get it over with.)

The concert opened with Barber’s Capricorn Concerto. This astringent music, with its oddly chosen scoring for flute, oboe and trumpet, was very well played, as more or less goes without saying for an Orpheus performance. I was carried back into my first radio days in Houston, when I discovered, thanks to music such as this, that there was a difference between the modern and the avant-garde. Barber was unambiguously a modernist who wished to please and entertain, and I remembered trying to imagine the state of mind of a modernist bourgeois listener who would be pleased and entertained by the Capricorn.

After the interval, we had Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. I had been thinking about the Orpheus way of making music, with its core committees and meetings and endless rehearsals, and I was beginning to realize that most musicians would probably not care to take on so much work. And that’s fine: if Orpheus shows us that you can make great music without a conductor, that doesn’t mean that there is anything wrong with conductors. What it does mean, though — and with blazing humanity — is that there is a big difference between music made by an orchestra executing a single mind’s idea of what’s important, and music made by a group of musicians each of whom has his or her own cohering idea of what’s important. The first tends to be more powerful, but the second is unquestionably more interesting.

The Metropolitan Musem Artists in Residence gave the first of three recitals at Grace Rainey Rogers. First up was Beethoven’s seldom-played Opus 44, a set of variations for piano trio. I knew the work vaguely, as I also knew the concluding Dvorak, because I’d put it on one of my Nano playlists. In between, Edward Arron played Luciano Berio’s Les mots sont allés, about which I don’t remember a thing, not a thing, except that it was evidently written to be played beautifully. Then we had a lovely string trio by Gideon Klein, a Moravian composer who helped to organize the musical establishment among inmates at Theresienstadt (where, one imagines, this work had its premiere) before meeting his own death at Auschwitz. The trio is the transporting souvenir of a mind that is very happy to be alive. As soon as I got home, I ordered a recording from Arkivmusic, because I’d like to see if it’s possible to get to know this music so well that the horrible circumstances surrounding its composition evaporate.

For Dvorak’s Piano Quartet, Opus 87,  Jeewon Park came back out to join the three principals of  MMArtists, who in addition to her husband, Mr Arron, include violinist Colin Jacobnsen and violist Nicholas Cords. The best performances of Germanic chamber music from the Nineteenth Century seem always to suggest that excellence of execution, no matter how manifest, is of secondary importance to the expression of the musicians’ friendship, and Mr Arron and his friends reminded us that this tendency attains its high point with Dvorak.

Kathleen begged me to wait to see The King’s Speech until she could see it with me, and I did. I liked it and was very heartwarmed, but I was surprised at how brown and quiet-looking it was. Every attempt appears to have been made to strip the picture of regal flash. Home Life at “The Firm” would make a good subtitle, if smart  movies had subtitles (why is that only the most brainless ones do?) Colin Firth, although a very handsome man, does not have the interestingly sleek, quasi-“Oriental” features of George VI; nor does he project majesty. Well, of course not; this is a movie about a stammerer who is taught the confidence to speak plaintly by a failed actor just this side of a mountebank. The movie’s funniest moment is also its most rude: the Duchess of York (the magnificent Helena Bonham Carter) trills that dinner with the family of her husband’s helper would be delightful and then immediately rolls up this prospect in the claim of a “previous engagement.” Without ruffling her composure in the slightest, the actress projects the alarm of a cat in free fall.

Geoffrey Rush, as the self-taught speech therapist Lionel Logue, is grand and craggy enough to anchor the story through its gales of potential uplift; there is also a terribly important scene in which the Duke of York (as he then still is) berates and spurns Logue with a heartlessness that makes you want to summon the RSPCA. And yet the story does not follow in the footsteps of The Madness of King George. This King George actually apologizes, which is also terribly important.

I wanted to see more of Eve Best, who plays Wallis Simpson with breathtakingly impudent self-assurance; what I’m probably clamoring for is a series of movies in which Ms Best and Guy Pearce enact further adventures of the Windsors. Mr Pearce is thoroughly convincing as “David,” a man who, all who knew him seem to agree, was fundamentally childish and inconsequential but also blessed with a godlike grace that his brother lacked. I also wanted to see more of Jennifer Ehle, who plays Mrs Logue; but then I always want to see more of Jennifer Ehle. Don’t you sometimes think that Jennifer Ehle is the Meryl Streep upgrade?

Another true-story movie that I saw but did not get round to writing up was the one in which Ewan McGregor plays a cutie by the name of Philip Morris — I Love You Philip Morris turns out to have nothing to do with smoking. Not a frame of this frolicsome film went by without my wondering, bewildered, how it ever got made. Where is the audience for a romp about a nutty gay con man?  Jim Carrey’s brio is so extreme that his scenes feel animated, to accommodate cartoonishly stretched limbs and leers — but we expect this of Mr Carrey. Philip Morris is a must-see movie because of the bashful glances that Mr McGregor casts through the magnolias of his eyelashes. 

¶ At MTC, we saw Spirit Control. (Kathleen also saw The Pitmen Painters; Ms NOLA took my ticket to that show.) The interesting thing about this play by Beau Willimon is that it works very well as a theatre piece but fails again and again as a formal structure. At the very beginning, Adam, an air-traffic controller, attempts to guide an inexperienced woman through the landing of a small plane. This increasingly hair-raising scene ends in a way that guarantees the audience’s sympathy with and concern for Adam, and a plainly naturalistic sequel would have been satisfying. As it is, Spirit Control ought to crash as disastrously as a misguided plane, but the performances are so strong that it doesn’t matter that we can’t go along with the playwright’s arty meta complications. We still care.

At the beginning of Daniel Kehlman’s Die Vermessung der Welt (Measuring the World, 2005), the mathematician Carl Freidrich Gauss journeys to Berlin, accompanied by his son, Eugen. The dyspeptic Gauss asks his son for a book.

Eugen gave him the one he had just opened: Friedrich Jahn’s German Gymnastics. It was one of his favorites.

Gauss tried to read, but seconds later he was already glancing up to complain about the newfangled leather suspension on the coach; it made you feel even sicker than usual. Soon, he explained, machines would be carrying people from town to town at the speed of a shot. Then you’d do the trip from Göttingent to Berlin in half an hour.

Eugen shrugged.

It was both odd and unjust, said Gauss, a real example of the pitiful arbitrariness of existence, that you were born into a particular time and held prisoner there whether you wanted it or not. It gave you an indecent advantage over the past and made you a clown vis-à-vis the future.

Eugen nodded sleepily.

Even a mind like his own, said Gauss, would have been incapable of achieving anything in early human history or on the banks of the Orinoco, whereas in another two hundred years each and every idiot would be able to make fun of him and invent the most complete nonsense about his character. He thought things over, called Eugen a failure again, and turned his attention to the book. As he read, Eugen in his distress turned his face fixedly to the window, to hide his look of mortification and anger.

German Gymnastics was all about exercise equipment. The author expounded at length on this or that piece of apparatus which he had invented for swinging oneself up or around on. He called one the pommel horse, another the beam, and another the vaulting horse.

The man was out of his mind, said Gauss, opened the window and threw the book out.

This passage has been much on my mind this year, because it pinpoints a truth about life in history that most people have no reason to attend to. They grow up in the world they’re born to, and it always seems natural. For tens of thousands of years, it’s true, human beings had no reason to imagine the possibility of other ways of life, but already by Gauss’s time (the early Nineteenth Century) the difference of a century or two in the timing of one’s arrival on earth could have a baleful effect on one’s opportunities. Today, differences appear much more rapidly. Had I been born a decade earlier, I might well have died, years ago, of colon cancer: my continued existence has depended upon the invention of fiber-optic cables, one of which detected a pre-cancerous tumor that turned out to be tricky to remove.

Far more palpably, as an everyday matter, I’ve lived long enough to make use of the Internet. To blog, even. If there’s one thing that I’m sure of, it’s that I was born to blog.

Here is a portion of the foregoing passage (translated by Carol Brown Janeway above) in the original.

Seltsam sei es und ungerecht, sagte Gauẞ, so recht ein Beispiel für die erbärmliche Zufälligkeit der Existenz, daẞ man in einer bestimmten Zeit geboren und ihr verhaftet sei, ob man wolle oder nicht. Es verschaffe einem einen unziemlichen Vorteil vor der Vergangenheit and mache eine zum Clown der Zukunft.

Sogar ein Verstand wie der seine, sagte Gauẞ, hätte in frühen Menschheitsaltern oder an den Ufern des Orinoko nichts zu leisten vermocht, wohingegen jeder Dummkopf in zweihundert Jahren sich über ihn lustig machen und absurden Unsinn über seine Person erfinden könne.

“Seltsam sei es und ungerecht” … “unziemlichen Vorteil” … “Clown.” I will continue to try, in the New Year, not to throw German Gymnastics out the window.

Trying to fashion a coherent response to The Kindly Ones in the immediate aftermath of its impact is wearying work, given my stunned and deranged state of mind. I’m aware of several objectives that don’t cohere. I’ve just read one of the most austerely monumental books that I’ll encounter in my lifetime, but the experience was occasionally so unpleasant that it feels foolish to press the book on your attention with glowing praise. By “unpleasant,” I don’t refer to the gas chambers and the genocide that are always in the background and occasionally in the foreground. I don’t refer to not infrequent display of fecal inconvenience. This subject-matter unpleasantness is, as one has every right to insist, handled ably by the writer’s prose. What I refer to is the impossibility of regarding Max Aue as a monster. The triumph of this novel is its humanization of a participant in the Final Solution. For many readers, I know, “triumph” is not the word for such an achievement; “disgrace” is more like it. But I am one of those people for whom a tiny but unbridgeable gap stretches between moral mind and committed deed, such that the mind is never captured by and reduced to the size of the deed. 

I’m going to jump in to a moment, about four fifths of the way into this thousand-page novel, that burned with cinematic intensity when I read it and that has lodged in my mind undigested. Forty-odd years ago, the scene might have been dished up by Kurt Vonnegut or Joseph Heller, marinated in absurdist irony. A crazed ghost of raucous laughter still seems to rumble from the far corners of the view — we are standing on one of those ramps where incoming prisoners are “selected” — but therre is none of the distance that makes absurdity funny. 

A bit of background. After his recovery from a gunshot wound that he rather strangely survives, Max casts about for a job in France, but in vain. At the prompting of two shadowy titans of business, Max reluctantly takes on an assignment relating to the concentration camps. Impressed by the pessimism of Albert Speer, who forecasts disaster for the Reich if the production of arms and vehicles is not increased, Max seizes on the hope of putting Germany’s prisoners to work. At first, the bustle of setting up and staffing an office, of arranging meetings and keeping busy, buoys Max up. Not for long, though. What’s alarming about Max’s exhaustive complaints is steady drip of pointlessness that leaks through them. Max imagines that he is running into various obstacles that might, if approached correctly, be moved, but it’s clear to us that all the research into nutrition and the reports on prison populations is simply useless. It’s partial and unreliable going in, and going out, it will have no impact on what anyone actually does. Max’s project is doomed by corruption, indifference, and the rising sense of national emergency. And because Max is trying to save lives, if only in the short term and for the purposes of extracting labor, we’re doubly disheartened: poor Max, poor prisoners. The power of The Kindly Ones rises from Jonathan Littell’s ability to make Max’s workday problems gripping by stretching them out, in lean but comprehensive physical detail, over questions of life and death. If lives, if the future of the Reich were not at stake (contrary goals), then perhaps none of it would be interesting. But since they are, listening to Max is not only fascinating but flabbergasting. After an “action” in Hungary, Max speeds up to Auschwitz, only to find that the rations problem is never going to come up, because most prisoners are immediately dispatched to the crematorium. It’s as though someone in a roomful of people without skills were to call out, “let’s put on a show.”

There wasn’t too much disorder; for a long time I observed the doctors who carried out the selection (Wirths wasn’t there), they spent one or two seconds on each case, at the slightest doubt it was no, they seemed also to refuse many women who looked perfectly able-bodies to me; when I pointed this out to him, Höss told me they were following his instructions, the barracks were overcrowded, there wasn’t any more room to put people in, the factories were making a fuss, weren’t taking these Jews fast enough, and the Jews were piling up, epidemics were beginning again, and since Hungary kept sending them every day, he was forced to make room, he had already carried out several selections among the inmates, he had also tried to liquidate the Gypsy camp, but there had been problems and it had been put off till later, he had asked for permission to empty the Theresienstadt “family camp” and hadn’t yet received it, so in the meantime he could really only select the best,  in any case if he took any more they would soon die of disease. He explained all this to me calmly, his empty blue eyes aimed at the crowd and the ramp, absent. I felt hopeless, it was even more difficult to talk to this man than to Eichmann.

***

All day I surveyed the camp, section by section, barrack after barrack; the men were hardly in better shape than the women. I inspected the registers: no one, of course, had thought to respect the basic rule of warehousing, first in, first out; whereas some arrivals didn’t even spend twenty-four hours in the camp before being sent on, others stagnated there for three weeks, broke down, and often died, which increased the losses even more. But for each problem I pointed out to him, Höss unfailingly found someone else to blame. His mentality, formed by the prewar years, was completely unsuited to the job, that was plain as day; but he wasn’t the only one to blame, it was also the fault of the people who had sent him to replace Liebehenschel, who, from the little I knew of him, would have gone about it completely differently.

This overall picture of ineptitude from which these two extracts are drawn, in a single paragraph that extends for nearly seventeen pages, explodes any idea that of cold German competence. I’m reminded of the ghoulish Chas Addams cartoon in which a patent lawyer aims a baroque weapon out his office window and complains to his would-be client, “Death ray? Fiddlesticks! It doesn’t even slow them down!”

The outer limits of classical-music geekery, I expect, but not an unpopulated place. Learning to live with and love the classics on iPod playlists. Where you can plan ahead.

I’ve just, for the first time, reproduced a playlist work for work, but with completely different performers. Here was the first Bach in Order playlist, in which English Suites, French Suites, Cello Suites and Partitas were sandwiched between concerti grossi from Corelli’s Opus 6. (If I find something to insert between the pairs of cgi at the “intermissions,” I’ll be in heaven.)

• Corelli: Trevor Pinnock and his band.
• English Suites: András Schiff.
• French Suites: Keith Jarrett.
• Cello Suites: Yo-Yo Ma.
• Partitas: Angela Hewitt.

And now, for the second round:

• Corelli: Ensemble 415.
• English Suites: Angela Hewitt.
• French Suites: Andrew Rangell.
• Cello Suites: Pierre Fournier.
• Partitas: Vladimir Ashkenazy.

When I saw that I had another set of Opus 6 (Sigiswald Kuijkin’s), and Angela Hewitt’s French Suites just lying around, I went ahead and ordered Lynn Harrell’s Cello Suites, Robert Levin’s English Suites, and András Schiff’s Partitas. Bach in Order III, coming up!

This is the sort of thing that was too cumbersome to imagine in the age of the LP. Or even with tapes. Hours’ worth of music, all familiar as hell, but all played by different people — and that’s, of course, what you notice. The performances stand out over the music itself, in a simply palpable way that’s, strangely, new.

And my choices, I hasten to confess, are as conservative as all get-out. That’s why there’s no Glenn Gould! (Yet!) I’ve just put in for Casals and Starker.