Here it is, nearly midnight, but instead of writing my Dear Diary entry, I’m reading an interview with Michael Musto at The New York Review of Ideas. (No, I didn’t know about it either [the NYRI], not until yesterday.) It’s nice to know that Michael Musto is a nice person. Actually, I learned this recently from another interview, with the Times I think but perhaps Vanity Fair, a short piece in which it was established that Mr Musto (a) doesn’t drink alcohol and (b) visits his mother every Saturday. Or was it Sunday? Anyway, he goes out to the boroughs and spends an entire weekend day with his mother. His mother is one lucky woman, let me tell you. I used to see things from what we’ll call the Michael Musto point of view. Now I see them from the Mom point of view.

Meanwhile, did I tell you that I’m dying? Well, I’d be dying if it weren’t for — what is this crap called? — Flourouracil. See? Nobody gets that stuff unless death is around the corner. How do you say it, anyway? At first, it made me think of “toura loura lay,” but now I think it’s “floura you’re a sil[ly],” with “flour” pronounced as in “flourish.” Anyhoo, it’s supposed to kill cancer before it starts — a delicious conundrum, don’t you think? My scalp is basically radioactive with cancers — an abandoned nuclear testing ground, Chernobyl goes to Yorkville — planted by insenstive guardians during my youth, imbeciles who made me stand out in left field for hours at a time, despite the fact that I have never liked being in the sun. Some people find the sun warm and pleasant, but I find it hot and unpleasant. And I always have. Left to my own devices, I would not be in need of You’re A Silly.

I put off the goop for about a month, or perhaps it was more like six weeks. I played dumb and said, “Oh, was I supposed to put this on my head? I thought I was supposed to put it here [indicating clavicle] once you’d told me that the wound had healed.” About thirty years ago, I realized that doctors will not wish you dead if you do not follow their instructions. There is no penalty — coming from the doctor, that is — if you don’t take the pills or refuse to give up French fries (“You’ll live forever if you give up the things that make you want to”). What’s curious is my way of resisting some treatments while accepting others without demur. Nobody likes colonoscopies, for example — but I used to, back in the day when a good doctor would plug you full of Demerol before plying the fiber optics. I was flying so high the first time (and this is not only twenty years ago but over twenty colonoscopies ago) that I practically choked on my tongue in an ultimately successful attempt to resist asking the doctor if he liked what he did. I can’t tell you how funny the question seemed at the time, but then you probably can’t imagine how much less nice than Michael Musto I am. 

¶ Matins: It’s  Bastille Day — but not in France. In France, it’s “La fête nationale.” What do you say to friends on le quatorze juillet?

You say, “Bonjour, madame,” comme d’habitude.

¶ Lauds: You know, before you even start reading, that Anthony Tommassini is not going to give Rufus Wainwright’s Prima Donna top marks. But if you read between the lines, his review begins to look like a rave.

¶ Prime: Robert X Cringely writes about the MADD strategies of Google and Microsoft, and how, if either of them suffers a mortal blow, it won’t have been aimed by the other.

¶ Tierce: Pardon me, but I’m no longer interested in the Marshall trial’s verdict, whatever it may be. I’m already casting the movie. Who wants to play Brooke Astor, banging her cane as she is “dragged” into the library? Or saying, “I feel like throwing food in someone’s face”?

¶ Sext: It’s very easy to make fun of Town & Country — if you’re not throwing up into an air-sickness bag — but Choire Sicha can be counted upon to do it well.

¶ Nones: We throw up our hands: both sides in the Honduras dispute request American intervention. What a sterling opportunity to make enemies and influence people to hate the United States.

¶ Vespers: At The Millions, novelist Sonya Chung tells us what it was like to meet her new book’s dust jacket.

¶ Compline: Meet the Schweeb. An amusement-park ride for the time being, it may become tomorrow’s urban transport. (Via Infrastructurist)

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In today’s Metropolitan Diary — how long has the Times been running that feature? I can remember that it didn’t exist, but not when — there was a sweet piece about a miraculously retrieved bookmark.

The other day I was cleaning out my bookshelves a bit. I always place unwanted books near the curb but away from the garbage so that people can have an opportunity to take a free book.

My wife finds it difficult to throw things out, so when she came home from work, seeing the books, she brought one back into the house. It was a book from her college days. Inside the book, as a place marker, she discovered an unopened letter from a friend. The postage was an 8-cent airmail stamp. The postmark was from 1966.

I slit open the letter and read it to her. It was fairly ordinary stuff, but the last line read, “Good luck on your upcoming blind date.” That blind date was me, 43 years ago. I guess it worked out; we’ve been married 41 years.

Instead of responding to this story with a warm purr, as I was supposed to do, I was busy writing, in my head, the Diary entry that would have been generated if Mrs Alexander had not gotten home in time to save her book.

The other day, I was delivering a bundle of hand-me-downs to my sister’s apartment in Kip’s Bay. Walking along the street, I spotted a box of books lying by the kerb. My eye was immediately drawn to a paperback copy of Jacques Barzun’s Teacher In America, because my favorite uncle was one of Barzun’s last students and he always spoke so reverently of the Columbia professor. I decided to help myself.

When I got home, I noticed an envelopoe tucked into the book, as a kind of bookmark. There was a postmark, dated 1966 — nine years before I was born! I slipped the letter out of the envelope and read the cheerful note from one female undergraduate to another. The writer, whose name was Michelle, mentioned that her boyfriend had taught himself how to play a new Beatles song on the guitar, and that he had serenaded her with it. Ah, the old days!

I was about to fold the letter back into the envelope when I read the PS. “Good luck on your upcoming blind date.” All at once, I wished that I’d never opened the letter. Whoever put the box of books out on East 22nd Street had had a blind date over forty years ago, but I’d never know how it worked out.

Here is something that you ought to know about New York City: every other regular reader of the Metropolitan Diary had the same idea.

A triumph of form over substance, this entry is supposed to be about stories that brewed on the Internet over the weekend. Stories that I considered beneath my notice. It was an unfortunately-timed concept, because you can’t expect a Michael Jackson to die every Thursday.

Better luck next week, eh?

Notwithstanding Kathleen’s convalescence, we had a good weekend, which I rather think we were owed. I had a wonderful sense of being ahead of schedule, whatever that means. What difference does it make whether I finish reading The Economist before 2 PM or before 3 PM? I don’t know why, but it makes a big difference. I’m learning that the passage from 2 until 4 is the tricky part of my day; the morning ends at around 2 (finally!), and the evening begins at 4 (already?). With only two hours of afternoon, it’s no wonder that I get edgy. It would be nicer, though, if I had a clearer idea of this Platonic ideal that my schedule is pinned to — and where it came from.

***

What if I gave away all but three or four cookbooks, and stopped reading Saveur? What if I threw away all the food catalogues? I think I’d be happier — I do! — but I’m not willing to risk having to buy new copies of all those cookbooks. Perhaps I ought to experiment with the catalogues and the magazines, though. Talking with Ms NOLA the other day, I realized (or said out loud for the first time) that I already know everything about cooking that I’m ever going to need or use.

This certainly doesn’t mean that I plan to rely on the same old recipes for the rest of my life. Quite the reverse, in fact — and that’s the point. I have a sound culinary technique, I know the foods and the flavors that I like, and I’m far more likely to turn out a good dish by relying on my own imagination than by following somebody else’s ideas.

This afternoon, for example, I was casting about for a sauce for cold salmon. Kathleen couldn’t eat mayonnaise (just to be safe), and dairy was out as well. But the doctor had excepted yogurt from the dairy ban, and I decided to except avocado from the raw-vegetable ban. I happened to have a tub of plain Greek yogurt in the fridge, and a perfectly ripe avocado in the vegetable basket. I had already run downstairs for a bunch of dill: preparing to poach the slice of Scotch salmon, I’d sniffed the jar of dried dillweed and smelled only dust. And, for that prized frugal touch, I had a quietly aging half-lemon lying on the counter. Into the food processor with all of it!

The result was not perfect. The taste of (one) avocado was muted by the plain yogurt. And a teaspoon of curry would have added significant interest, if (a) Kathleen weren’t convalescing and (b) I’d whipped up the sauce about three hours earlier. To thin the sauce, which was thicker than mayonnaise, I added a few tablespoons of water — which felt very odd but which was just right, as I needed liquidity without (extra) flavor. The sauce, spooned over the chilled salmon, went delightfully with steamed zucchini slices as well. Capellini tossed with parmesan cheese completed the summer-luncheon plate.

I’m sure that the avocado-yogurt-dill-lemon sauce appears in a million cookbooks. It’s even possible that I followed a recipe for it once, long ago. It really doesn’t matter. Originality is not the name of the game.

When I asked Kathleen yesterday what she wanted for dinner, I could see her flesh crawl at the prospect of yet more chicken. But the more robust choices were out. How about veal, she asked. So I toddled down to Agata & Valentina and bought a nice rib chop. This I rubbed with a drop of oil and a tablespoon of crushed sage. Broiled for eight minutes on each side, the chop was done to perfection, retaining the faintest blush of pink at the center. I served it with haricots verts and Yukon fingerlings. The potatoes were steamed, and Kathleen had hers plain, without the butter that I swirled mine in. The beans were snipped, parboiled, and sautéed — in Benecol. The Benecol didn’t fool me into thinking that the beans were buttered, but it came close enough.

***

At Crawford Doyle on Friday afternoon, I remembered that Ms NOLA had strongly recommended reading Peter Cameron’s Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You. She also assured me that I’d “knock it off in a day.” Which indeed I did, even though I didn’t start reading it until late yesterday afternoon. I not only read it, I read most of it aloud to Kathleen, while she knitted receiving-blanket prototypes. I was hugely moved.

Well, as you know, I’m hugely moved all the time — I’m lucky that way. But yesterday’s movement was more of a scraping. The way that I’ve developed of remembering my adolescence was what got scraped away. So much of Mr Cameron’s book reminded me of what my teens were really like — which was somewhat surprising, since the novel’s narrator was born in 1985 or thereabouts, nearly forty years later than I was. You’d think that our experiences of adolescence, given everything that has changed, would be rather different, but no.

James Sveck is a very intelligent graduate of Stuyvesant High, class of ’03. He spends the ensuing summer scheming to avoid going to Brown in the Fall. He thinks that college will be a waste of time, and he is very articulate about why. Reason Number One: he hates people his own age, probably because they are adolescents. This displacement was extraordinarily familiar. Teenagers are supposed to suffer all sorts of existential doubts about themselves, but, like James, what I experienced instead was a conviction about others. Especially other adolescent males.

“What’s so bad about college students?”

“They’ll all be like Huck Dupont.”

“You’ve never met Huck Dupont.”

“I don’t need to meet him. The fact that his name is Huck and he got a full hockey scholarship to the University of Minnesota is enough for me.”

“What’s wrong with hockey?”

“Nothing,” I said, “if you like blood sport. But I don’t think people should get full scholarships to state universities because they’re psychopathic.”

I may have put it better myself at the time, but never mind. Forget Holden Caulfield; I knew how to piss people off big-time. As does James.

There’s one line in the book that screamed RJ! so loud that I felt slightly violated. Having “acted out” — a phrase that sadly didn’t exist in my day — on a school trip, James has been sent to a therapist. After weeks of sessions, the shrink finally confronts James about his meltdown. Typically (I’m speaking from experience), James parries her questions with further questions, as if he were the doctor. But he’s not the doctor. At a crucial point, she gets a rise out of him.

“So you assumed I was arrested?” 

“I suppose I did.”

“Well, I wasn’t arrested. And the so-called trouble with the police wasn’t my fault. It was my parents’. They got the police involved. They filed a missing persons resport. If they hadn’t done that, everything would have been fine. Or less bad.”

“Were you missing?”

I realized she had tricked me into talking about what had happened in Washington, and even though I felt okay about talking about it, I wanted to make it clear I was aware I had been tricked, so I didn’t answer.

I think you could say that I spent my youth — not just my adolescence, but my the years between the time when I was first commanded to play baseball (to which I responded with a passive ressistance that I did not need Gandhi to teach me, perhaps because even in fourth grade I was larger than Gandhi) and the time when I decided to buckle down and study for the law boards —  you could say that I spent my life “making it clear.”

A  very pet peeve. So pet, in fact, that I may have complained about it before, if not, I trust, in this column.

At The Awl, Dave Bry concludes one of his mortifying but compulsively-readable apologies by assuring the musician, Bob Mould,

I’m different than that now.

<Screech of grating chalk!>

“Different than” is the most ill-tutored solecism that I know of that does not involve the misuse of a personal pronoun.

This was what got Tim and I started.

I’m always astonished to hear this sort of thing from smart, presumably educated people. (In this case, Matt Thompson at Snarkmarket.)

Whereas the misuse of personal pronouns appears to be strongly linked to socio-economic background (yet another reason to shun it), different than has not been as strenuously weeded out in the better schools. It places speakers in the class not of rich or poor but of inattentive.

For an adverb, such as than, to have a function in this formulation, the adjective that it modifies must be a comparative, so that the adverb can point to a  difference in the degree to which the adjectival quality obtains.

He is smarter and better-looking than I am.

Not

He is smart and good-looking than I am.

Similarly, we might say,

You are more different than I am.

(If this sounds wrong, it’s only because we prefer to use unusual when making comparisons about personal singularity.)

Without the comparative, there is nothing for an adverb to do in Mr Bry’s sentence; at the same time, there is the need for a preposition — from — to mark the distance, literal or figurative, between two states or things.

The curious thing is that, to reflect his thought more clearly (if less modestly), the word that Mr Bry ought to change is not than but different.

I’m better than that now.

And perhaps his sense is betrayed by his mistake.

last Week at Portico: Even though five Daily Office entries appeared this week — more about why in a moment — I managed to write le minimum: pages on last Friday’s movie, Public Enemies, on this week’s novel, Cheerful Weather for the Wedding (more of a novella, really), and of course the Book Review review.

Over the holiday weekend, I decided, rather quickly, to replace the Monday edition of the Daily Office with a Friday edition. This will allow me to enjoy the weekend more freely, or at least to have more time for reading. Some sort of brief news post will appear on Monday, but the nature of its contents may take the rest of the summer to settle.

Ms NOLA and I got together again this afternoon. I saw Whatever Works at eleven, at the Angelika — and, once again, there was sound trouble. (At least the sound never cut out entirely silent, as it did for Elegy, in the same auditorium.) But nothing could diminish the splashing summer fun of Patricia Clarkson’s astonishing performance — the most astonishing aspect of which was that an astonishing actress could astonish. (Come to think of it, Ms Clarkson appeared in Elegy as well. Maybe the sound gremlin is her doing.) After the movie, I walked over to Spring Street, between Crosby and Lafayette, to visit a shop that was written up in the Times the other day. What a ha-ha Kathleen had at my expense when I announced that I’d discovered it: she has been going to an uptown branch of Pylones for four years at least (sez she). I bought a bunch of stuff, but this was the pièce de résistance. At least Kathleen was kind enough to pronounce it cool.

Then I hopped on the train and rode up to 28th Street. Ms NOLA and I had a lunch date at La Petite Auberge, an ancient-looking French restaurant on Lex with an ancient-looking menu. There is nothing ancient-tasting about the food, however. Although it’s conservative, it is not preserved.

There was much to discuss. It was all utterly confidential and très hush-hush. Ms NOLA actually surveyed the restaurant at one point, to make sure that we were “alone.” By the time we left, there was no need to survey the restaurant, because everyone else had left.

After a little errand at a nearby print shop, we headed up to Yorkville and the Upper East Side, where we eventually found ourselves at the Museum’s Roof Garden. This year’s artist, Roxy Paine, has “planted” the terrace with what looks like a wildly out-of-control potato vine and an ice-bedecked bramble.

It was glorious, up on the roof. There was a fine breeze that moderated the beat of the sun. I had a couple of glasses of Prosecco. Ms NOLA soaked up the greenery of the clipped yews that border the garden (not to mention the grand carpet of treetops that separated us from Midtown). Life was good.

We went downstairs and sailed quickly through the Francis Bacon show.  I make a point of visiting the big painting or drawing shows whenever I’m at the Museum, even if it’s only for a few minutes’ visit. That is the luxury of living nearby: there is always time for a quick run-through — and for a few stop-and-stares along the way. I have begun to recognize the face of George Dyer even after his lover has rearranged it.

Stopping in at Crawford Doyle minutes before it closed, and loading up on great books that I may not live to read, we returned to the apartment and drank tea on the balcony. Eventually, we persuaded Kathleen to come home. Actually, she met us at the New Panorama Café, where she dared to dine on her usual dish, penne al pomodoro. A consultation with the internist lifted the prisoner-of-war diet. Kathleen is to avoid whole milk, butter, and cream for a week, but she can eat hard cheese, which of course  mean reggiano parmegiano. Last time I checked, she was sleeping comfortably. Ms NOLA hopped on a bus afterward, and I have been here at my desk ever since. It hardly feels like three hours!

¶ Matins: Tear down that highway! Four cases (two of them in San Francisco) where getting rid of a highway improved congestion, by taking the Braess Paradox seriously.

¶ Lauds: Fr-eye-day Candy: Vlad Artazov’s witty and beautiful sinkers.

¶ Prime: At The Corner Office, Jeffrey Pfeffer shows how a misguided belief in efficient markets enables laziness and perpetuates errors.

¶ Tierce: The poor jury — they haven’t been able to do a thing all week except show up and leave. Today, the lawyers argued about evidence again: the admissability of Pearline Noble’s diary. (Don’t ask.)

¶ Sext: We can’t tell you how wet we think this iPhone app is. What’s more infurtiating than some guy strolling through a subway station as if he actually knew where he was going — instead of following Exit Strategy.

¶ Nones: Russell Lee Moses counsels against reading too much into the Urumqi riots; that is, interpreting the unrest as a genuine threat to the Communist Party’s lock on power.

¶ Vespers: It has been so long now that we’ve misplaced the lead that took us to The Neglected Book Page, where, as you can imagine, one thing leads to another. Pretty soon, we were perusing a list of 100 unread novels.

¶ Compline: Villa Trianon was a dump in 1906, when Elsie de Wolfe and Elizabeth Marbury bought it for $16,000 and turned it into a showplace. After World War II, Elsie turned it into a showplace all over again. Now it’s a dump. My good friend, George Snyder, is looking for a willing millionaire to save it. Do you know one?

¶ Bon weekend à tous!

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Today was gloriously “meta.” Astonishingly!

Don’t you hate that word? “Meta” always sounds to me like one of those awful Midwestern women’s names from the last century. And did you know that all it means — “meta” — is “after” or “between”? All right, it’s more complicated than that; as a preposition, μετά means different things depending upon the case of the associated noun. But the one thing that μετά does not mean is “meta.” Here’s why:

They were arranging Aristotle’s books on a shelf one day. So to speak. Aristotle’s “books” were in most cases passels of notes taken by students and recensed after the philosopher’s demise. The book that begins, “All men by nature desire to know” somehow wound up shelved after the book that begins,

When the objects of an inquiry, in any department, have principles, causes, or elements, it is through acquaintance with these that knowledge and understanding is attained. Are we dead yet?

This second/first book was called, for very clear reasons — it’s about the world that we perceive — Physics. The next book on the shelf, which is about some other world, some world that we can’t see, and that, therefore, in the eyes of many ancient Greeks and even more modern Americans, is better than the world described in Physics, came to be called Metaphysics — the book after Physics.

However: here’s why the day was “meta”: I was busy all day reading and writing stuff for The Daily Blague and Portico. That was it. The things that did not pertain to Internet sites belonged under the category of breathing: I made the bed. I ate lunch. I collected the mail and went to Food Emporium. I made shrimp risotto for one (Kathleen is still on her prisoner-of-war diet). I still have to wash half of the dishes. Fascinating stuff.

When I wasn’t being domestically fascinating, I was thinking thoughts that have already been copyrighted by other pages. If I were to write about them here, it would be the world’s most ludicrous episode of “Behind the Scenes!” Which, come to think of it, isn’t so far from “Between the Scenes!”

¶ Matins: Max Fisher calls it semitarianism, and Peter Smith likes it. Now, eat your vegetables.

¶ Lauds: The evolving aesthetic of public monuments finds interesting expression in a new 7/7 memorial, soon to be unveiled in Hyde Park.

¶ Prime: The death of Robert McNamara reminds Philip Delves Broughton, author of Ahead of the Curve: Two Years at Harvard Business School, of what he calls “The McNamara Syndrome.” (via Felix Salmon)

¶ Tierce: Ya gotta admit: the trial as eveything: Gurneys! Oxygen! A men’s room shut down for an hour, while Charlene comforts her traviato.

¶ Sext: Henry Alford files a report about leftovers: “chunks of some sort of appalling turgid brownish oozing cake.”

¶ Nones: In the bad old days, utter nincompoops could inherit thrones. Now, they get elected. But the problem is the same: how do you get rid of them? The kid-glove approach taken by the Honduran élite seems not to have worked.

¶ Vespers: Chalk another win up for NYRB Books: they’ve reissued L J Davis’s A Meaningful Life — now, 29 years after hardcover publication, in cloth. John Self enthuses.

¶ Compline: John Lancaster, a Washington-based journalist, did not finish out his term at Atchison College, Pakistan’s top prep school (boys only, natch), but he did gather enough material for a must-read report. (via  The Morning News) Read the rest of this entry »

This morning’s Read bored me quite to sobs. Lord Chesterfield’s letter, which I’ll get to in a moment, was the only good thing — but I’d read it before. Don Quixote and Sancho had a particularly silly and pointless quarrel that might have amused me if I had not been laid low by an excruciating chapter in Moby-Dick (the one about the history of the Enderbys and the Coffins — I can’t be bothered to touch the book twice in one day) and a lot of context-free chitchat in Squillions — than which it is impossible to imagine a worse-edited collection of letters. It might help if I understood — really understood — what Herman Melville and Barry Day set out to accomplish. All that I see is tedious inappropriateness.

Writing about the difficulty of determining the mainspring of a man’s character, Chesterfield seizes on the examples provided by those two eminent cardinals, Richelieu and Mazarin — though he goes at them in reverse order.

I mean ambition and avarice: the latter is often the true cause of the former, and then is the predominant passion. It seems to have been so in Cardinal Mazarin, who did anything, submitted to anything, and forgave anything, for the sake of plunder. He loved and courted power, like an usurer, because it carried profit along with it. Whoever should have formed his opinion or taken his measure singly, from the ambitious part of Cardinal Mazarin’s character, would have found himself often mistaken. Some who had found this out, made their fortunes by letting him cheat them at play. On the contrary, Cardinal Richelieu’s prevailing passion seems to have been ambition, and his immense riches only the natural consequences of that ambition gratified; and yet I make no doubt but that the ambition had now and then its turn with the former, and avarice with the latter. Richelieu (by the way) is so strong a proof of the inconsistency of human nature, that I cannot help observring to you, that while he absolutely governed both his King and his country, and was, in a great degree, the arbiter of the fate of all Europe, he was more jealous of Corneille than of the power of Spain; and more flattered with being thought (what he was not) the best poet, than with being thought (which he certainly was) the greatest statesman in Europe; and affairs stood still while he was concerting his criticism upon the Cid.

For my part, I don’t see Richelieu’s literary ambition as an inconsistency.

The cadence “did anything, submitted to anything, and forgave anything, for the sake of plunder” is magnificently dishy. “Plunder” is exactly the mot juste. It sounds like dirty laundry.

After dinner, we watched Gambit, a favorite movie that never ceases to surprise us — the surprise being that Ronald Neame’s 1966 caper flick isn’t celebrated as a great Hollywood entertainment. Maybe the film is too good. For the first twenty minutes, we’re treated to the “perfectly planned” scenario that will bring Harry Dean (Michael Caine) into larcenous proximity with a fabulously valuable portrait bust; Nicole  Chang (Shirley MacLaine), an attractive Hong Kong taxi dancer, will run interference for him by mesmerizing the wealthiest man in the world (and the owner of the portrait bust), Ahmad Shahbandar (Herbert Lom), with recollections of his late wife. What you might miss the first time through is that, in the enactment of the plan, Nicole never utters a word. She is the perfect woman: mysterious and silent. By “too good,” I mean that things go hilariously downhill from there.

In fact, Nicole is something of a chatterbox. The movie ads teased viewers by giving them permission to tell their friends how the movie ends, as long as they didn’t tell how it begins. Because the beginning is a fantasy, a male pipe-dream in which careful forethought is mistaken for a guarantee of success. Harry Dean’s plan is a beaut. But it is just a plan, and it assumes that Harry knows all there is to know about his mark. In the end, of course, Harry is utterly dependent on Nicole’s ability to improvise escapes from potentially mortifying hot spots.

One of the film’s little jokes is that Harry Dean, a compleat Cockney (“What’s the matter wi’ you?”), pretends to be Sir Harold Dean, old Etonian (Thank you”). Harry thinks that he has done his homework, but he can’t tell Shahbandar the name of the headmaster back in the day. He hasn’t even taken the trouble to impersonate a baronet his own age. As Nicole discovers to her chagrin, Harry has concocted his plan in the friction-free laboratory of his own conceit.

***

In the Book Review this week, Dominique Browning reviews Frances Osborne’s book about her great-grandmother, The Bolter. In the review, Ms Browning refers to An Aesthete’s Lament, one of my blidgeted blogs and, indeed, the source of my awareness of the book, which, at the time, was not available here in the United States. So I did what Idina Sackville (the Bolter) would have done and ordered a copy from Amazon in England (“Amazuke.”) I’m not saying that Idina Sackville would have gone to any trouble about ordering a book — she doesn’t appear to have been much of a reader — but she tended to traverse with dispatch the shortest distance between herself and what she wanted.

Sadly, though, The Bolter has not turned out to be a book that I want to read. Much of the book is good enough or better, but much of it is quite regrettable, at least by my lights. Here is Paris, shortly after the beginning of the Great War:

Paris was a city of façades: brushed pavements, manicured parklets, rows of little shop fronts and grand colonnades. Its web of cobbled alleyways, passages and petites rues led from the damp, sweet air of bakeries to the rich aromas of cafés before tumbling out into long, wide boulevards. Here proud, pale-stoned bâtiments descended in classical lines to the ground, where suddenly the archways and wrought iron gates broke into curls and twisted vines — pure, shivering, Parisian elegance.

These comely and inviting phrases describe Paris to a T, as indeed I can attest from my last visit, in 2003. Ms Osborne’s flourish captures what we might call the Eternal Paris, but it lacks the frank decency to begin, “Paris, then as now…” The sheer padding-ness of her sweet little paragraph is so egregious that it’s funny. But The Bolter is not a funny book.

And, let’s face it: “Paris was a city of façades” is a statement that deserves to be chiseled on a marble slab at the Prep School Hall of Bull Shit Fame. The author sometimes appears determined to be as verbally depraved as her thrice-plus-twice divorced great-grandmother was sexually. Indeed, it was doubtful that I’d finish The Bolter, until Ms Browning’s reference to An Aesthete’s Lament. That pricked my sense of responsibility. One of the Aesthete’s readers would have to file a book report; it might as well be me. Which is abominable conceit for you, as Ms Browning, also quite clearly a reader, has not only done the job but been paid for it.

***

It’s not that I’m a pessimist, really, but I don’t go in for the kind of daydream that, in Gambit, leads Harry Dean down the garden path. Instead of foreseeing that a plan will proceed like clockwork, I anticipate elaborately contingent disasters. My attempt to withdraw money from a local ATM, for example, will be thwarted by an out-of -control, Taking of Pelham-type “police activity” in the subway station below the bank. The Harry Deans of the world would take up dishwashing if they had to run their schemes by me for approval.

That’s why, once the initial surprise mellowed into ongoing delight, I decided not to mention my grandchild’s existence until his or her graduation from high school. I was tempted, just now, to specify a college graduation, but that prediction seemed uncomfortably fraught. Perhaps college will be completely passé in 2031 — and how likely is it that I’ll be compos mentis at the age of 83? As it is, the child’s more immediate hurdle is birth itself, an event that will roughly coincide with my turning 62. Which I don’t dare to look forward to!

Kathleen, however, is knitting.

 

¶ Matins: Is the Group Health Cooperative of Puget Sound a template for health care reform?

¶ Lauds: My friend Ellen Moody writes about the strange success of Ronald Colman.

¶ Prime: According to Patrick Devedjian, the French stimulus minister, “The country that is behind is the U.S., not France.”

¶ Tierce: Defendant Anthony Marshall called in sick today, and the jurors were excused. Vanity Fair comes to the rescue, with a slideshow of sketches by Jane Rosenberg.

¶ Sext: It’s time for lunch: think I’ll cloud up my vital fluids.

¶ Nones: Coup or clean-out? The fact that the Obama Administration can’t seem to decide upon a characterization of recent events in Honduras suggests to me that we’re going to support the new regime.

¶ Vespers: Richard Crary writes about youthful reading and outgrowing writers.

¶ Compline: Remember the “Peter Principle”? Italian researchers have confirmed it. (via reddit)

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The quiet life that I have taken up this summer — I’m “away,” even though I haven’t gone anywhere — has created a vacuum of sorts, and my mind is filling it up with all sorts of miscellaneous reflections. Some of the things that pop into my head are “live” issues that I’m “thinking” about, with a captial “T.” Others are scraps of memory — but they’re not what you’d call “memories.” They’re the ashes, or ghosts, or whatever, of old longings. I used to abound in longings. Now I have only one longing, and that is to live until tomorrow. I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

Among the capital-T thoughts: Freud. For some time now, Freud has been regarded, by intelligent people, not as the radical sexologist who assured us that we all harbored unspeakable thoughts about our parents, but as a humanist who made it possible to talk about — sex. Look back at “the literature” (any literature!) before Freud, and you will find that sexuality pretty much equals bestiality, something that human beings, half-beast but also half-angel, ought to rise above. You will find that no responsible person prior to Freud had anything systematically positive to say about sex. (By “systematically positive,” I mean to exclude the occasional enthusiastic insight penned on a Greek-island junket.) Freud humanized sex — and the proof of his achievement is in the odd sound of that statement. How could sex be in need of humanizing? Trust me: it needed it, especially after Augustine was through with it.

Freud’s contribution, then, was to make talk about sex decent. It’s a staggering achievement. In a few short treatises on dreams and slips of the tongue and whatnot, Freud demolished three thousand years of patriarchal nonsense about carnality.

Almost everything that Freud had to say about sex, though, was wrong, at least as regards specifics. How many boys experience “the Oedipus complex”? I daresay that the lusts of small boys have no respectable Greek-myth correlative, and would look, if realized, a lot like Animal House.

Everybody knows that Freud is wrong about the particulars. But one problem remains. If, prior to Freud, only pathological misfits were obsessed by sex, after Freud, everybody was obsessed by sex. (As you can imagine, this universalization was vital, if Freud’s theories were to be decent.) But, just as only a handful of human beings prior to Freud were, fact, truly bestial, so, after Freud, only a handful of human beings were what Freud would have called “genital.” The rest of us having been spending fortunes on spas and vitamin supplements in hopes of becoming as fully sexualized as we “ought to be.”

Especially those of us who are not twenty years old.

What’s great about sex, when you get right down to it, is the very material evidence that you’re wanted, however briefly. Not only wanted, but permitted to want right back. Orgasm is nature’s way of putting this neediness away, at least for a while, while at the same time gratifying it.

So much for Thoughts. (I could have gone on about Freud all night!) As for Memory, I’m remembering the keen desire to Go Out.

The desire to Go Out, suffered to unspeakable degrees by almost everyone between the ages of 21 and 35, is strangely assymetrical. There is no corresponding desire to Go Home. If you actually want to go home, you are probably about to be arrested. You would rather go home than be detained by the police, which is almost certainly what you deserve — if you have reached the phase of wanting, truly, to Go Home.

Now that I no longer desire to Go Out (not at all), I’m surprised by the power of the view from the balcony (portion shown above) to remind me of the feeling without actually rekindling it. Why should the sight of a thousand windows, some of them lighted, slightly more of them not — and all of them signals of housebound domesticity — arouse a desire to freshen up, don an outfit, and venture forth in the cool summer evening?

Freud would have said it was sex. If only!

 

¶ Matins: Ross Douthat writes lucidly about the the problem posed by someone like Sarah Palin to American politics. It has a lot to do with that problem that Americans don’t like to admit that we have: class distinctions.  

¶ Lauds: Plans to house Gap founder Don Fisher’s modern art collection in San Francisco’s Presidio have been gored by a combination of  NIMBYism and very mistaken preservationism. (via Arts Journal)

¶ Prime: Felix Salmon argues very persuasively against subjecting credit default swaps to regulation by state insurance commissioners. Although slightly daunting at the start, Mr Salmon’s entry is definitely worth the effort.

¶ Tierce: They wanted to put Cecille Villacorta away for a long time. But her lawyer, Joe Tacopina (get his card, now!)  convinced the judge that the Saks saleslady had been trained to increase her commissions by sending kickbacks to favorite customers.

“Basically, Cecille’s saying, ‘You told me to do this. You trained me to do this. I made you $27 million. And I became a defendant,” Tacopina said after court yesterday.

¶ Sext: In case you’ve ever coveted one of those Gill Sans “Keep Calm and Carry On” T shirts (complete with crown), Megan Hustad’s write-up may cure you, at The Awl.

¶ Nones: The death of Robert McNamara occasions a great deal of reflection — if only we can find the time.

¶ Vespers: Hey! See action in war-torn quarters of the globe while engaging in serious literary discussions with brainy fellow warriors! Join the Junior Officers’ Reading Club today!

¶ Compline: According to Psychology Today [yes, we know that we ought to stop right there], parks occupy an astonishing 25.7% of New York City’s surface area! That’s what density makes possible. Read the rest of this entry »

¶ Lord Chesterfield invites his son to regard him as a censor.

I can now undertake this employment only upon hearsay, or at most, written evidence; and therefore shall exercise it with great lenity and some diffidence; but when we meet, and that I can form my judgment upon ocular and auricular evidence, I shall no more let the least impropriety, indecorum, or irregularity, pass uncensured, than my predecessor Cato did. I shall read you with the attention of a critic, not with the partiality of an author; different in this respect, indeed, from most critics, that I shall seek for faults, only to correct, and not to expose them.

Has anyone ever thought of writing another jolly musical on Pygmalian themes: My Fair Bastard?

¶ In Moby-Dick, Ahab colloquiates with a fellow whaling captain who has also lost a limb to the White Whale; unlike Ahab, Captain Boomer has learned his lesson.

No more White Whales for me; I’ve lowered for him once, and that has satisfied me. There would be great glory in killing him, I know that; and there is a ship-load of precious sperm in him, but, hark ye, he’s best let alone; don’t you think so, Captain?” — glancing at the ivory leg.

“He is. But he will still be hunted, for all that. What is best let alone, that accursed thing is not always what least allures. He’s all a magnet! How long since thou saw’st him last? Which way heading?”

¶ In Don Quixote, our hero’s encounter with the villagers who feel insulted by their neighbors’ braying mockery, goes swimmingly, until Sancho decides to say a few words — followed by a few sounds.

I remember, when I was a boy, I used to bray whenever I felt like it, and nobody held me back, and I did it so well and so perfectly that when I brayed all the donkeys in the village brayed, but that didn’t stop me from being my parents’ son, and they were very honorable people and even though this talent of mine was envied by more than a few of the conceited boys in my village, I didn’t care at all. And so that you can see that I’m telling the truth, wait and listen, because if you know this, it’s like knowing how to swim: once you’ve learned you never forget.

“But one of the men who was near him, thinking he was mocking them, raised a long pole…”

¶ In Squillions, Noël Coward writes, to Laurence Olivier, that Marilyn Monroe “is certainly no Madame de Staël, is she?” He’s not asking.

How to get to New Hampshire, that is the question.

Aside from the usual New England prettiness, New Hampshire has nothing to recommend it, and ought probably to be expelled from our enlightened republic. Most of the inhabitants would never notice.

There’s this one thing, though: my aunt and most of my cousins live there. They’re no more New Hampshire natives than I’m a Texan. We were all living happily in Westchester until a couple of late-Sixties catastrophes propelled my father and his brother in different professional directions. Even then, New York was more easily reached from Houston than it was from Hillsborough County.

A visit from me is somewhat overdue, and yet I find myself asking why I, who live in the center of the universe, am not welcoming my aunt and my cousins on visits to New York City. I suspect that the answer goes something like this. The move to the Monadnocks was so traumatic that the appeal of Gotham must evermore be denied. So much so that, until his death a few years ago, my uncle used to take my aunt on annual visits to London (Angleterre) to see the latest shows. There was a certain Bronx-cheering ostentation in this gesture that I never called. I guess I’m doing so now.

I used to visit my relations in Wilton, Lyndeborough Center, and Peterborough so often that they were afraid, as the bumper sticker has it, that I’d take over. But there came a point after which I could no longer drive responsibly. My rigid neck made unsignaled intersections difficult and dangerous to cross. (Wah Wah! Don’t Cry For Me, AAA!)

The very idea of Kathleen’s driving requires a separate entry, but as everyone who knows her knows, it is an absolute impossibility. In any case, she talks of flying to Manchester and hiring a car and driver for the weekend. This rather chichi option has its appeal, and no doubt I’d like to tour the North of Italy in such a conveyance. But I have no intention of pulling up at my aunt’s kerb in a limousine. The simple truth is that I’m unwilling to go anywhere in this sad strange country that I live in that doesn’t doesn’t give me NRA-level freedom of transportation. If I can’t walk out into the street, raise my hand, and stop a taxi, then I don’t want to go there.

As for people don’t want to come to New York City, then they’re not telling the truth when they claim to want to see me. He who is tired of Gotham is tired of RJK. C’est ça.  

 

¶ Matins: Another way of looking at Earthly inequality: 50% of the world’s population inhabits nations that, in sum, produce only 5% of the world’s GDP.

¶ Lauds: Elliot Goldenthal discusses his beautifully moody score for Public Enemies with Jim Fusilli, at Speakeasy.

¶ Prime: Matt Thompson, at Snarkmarket, writes about the long overdue concept of “too big to succeed.”

¶ Tierce: Just when we thought that the prosecution had exhausted its witnesses hostile to defendant Anthony Marshall, in walks the accountant.

¶ Sext: So, we’ll bet you thought that a 50-pound ball of Silly Putty, if dropped from a 10-storey building, would do some awesomly rampaging bouncing. Not so.

¶ Nones: Ethnic riots in Urumqi probably don’t threaten the stability of the Communist Party’s regime in China, but they do suggest that Uighur “aliens” don’t cotton to Shake-‘n’-Bake Han colonization.

¶ Vespers: At The Millions, C Max Magee looks forward to books forthcoming in the second half of 2009. It’s better than Christmas — even if all you want to read is the new Joshua Ferris and a genuine novel by Nicholson Baker.

¶ Compline: A phrase that’s altogether new to us: (to) gay marry. Friendship with (abstract?) benefits.

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This morning, implementing a diabolical plot, I poisoned Kathleen, subjecting her to a life of torment.

I confess!

The plot was diabolical because it was impatient. Kathleen’s tummy bug has been with us for several weeks now, and it has not responded to my stream of eviction notices. This morning, I persuaded Kathleen that she had recovered enough to have an almost-normal weekend breakfast. But the croissant and the scrambled eggs, while perhaps not deadly on their own, were catalyzed by coffee and fresh-squeezed orange juice into a toxic fireball that kept Kathleen in bed all day — because the bed is to stay close to the bathrrom.

The glorious weather outside was simply an insult.

Kathleen sweetly begged me not to feel bad, but it was impossible. If I had deliberately slipped her a poison pill, my remorse could not have been greater. What ought to have been a pleasant day on the balcony, knitting and checking out eBay was instead a tableau vivant from the last days of a beloved cholera victim. It was some comfort that Kathleen didn’t run a fever at all; it seemed simply to be a matter of her body saying NO! A THOUSOUND TIMES, NO! to fresh-squeezed orange juice. And not kidding about the thousand times, either.

At five o’clock on Sundays, Kathleen calls her parents. I offered to call on her behalf, and the offer was accepted. I told Kathleen’s father what I’d done. He laughed. I resolved not to mention this unbelievable callousness to Kathleen, but when I recounted the verbal portion of our conversation, she smiled (wanly!) and said, “Daddy probably laughed.” The joke was that I’m as impatient as my father-in-law for rude good health to grace his partner. And indeed I am, only I haven’t his excuse. For in truth I’m the sick person in this household. The one who, before Remicade, used to spend days and weeks as Kathleen spent this afternoon.

In all seriousness, I was very angry with myself. Kathleen kept saying, “But I decided that I could handle the orange juice. You didn’t force-feed me!” Sweetest Kathleen! What Kathleen actually decided, though, was that it was easier to drink the orange juice than to bear the atmospheric pressure of my pouts and whistles.

They talk about people who are “bad patients,” who can’t let others nurse them through, say, a tummy bug. But I am a “bad nurse.” Get well soon, or it’s “bring out your dead.”

Or, from Kathleen’s viewpoint, it’s as Winston Churchill immortally put it: “If I were your husband, madam, I would drink that orange juice!”