last Week at Portico: It was beneath us, of course, but we went to see Todd Phillips’s The Hangover  last week. We went alone, thinking it unwise to tell anyone that we were going, much less to ask anyone to join us. We told ourselves that the movie would be surprisingly different in unexpected ways, but at least we don’t have to take back saying that to anybody else. We also read Geoff Dyer’s Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi , and decided that it’s a first-rate piece of conceptual art. Fun to read, too. Rather more engaging, or at least more geared to our possibly vétuste sensibilities, was this week’s New Yorker story, Lorrie Moore’s “Childcare.”

As for this week’s Book Review, the one truly good review in the entire issue was written by Liesl Schillinger, who is a critic. I’m not saying that Ms Schillinger ought never to write a novel, as long as she learns who to write one better than any of the novelists appearing this week knows how to play critic. Caleb Crain, who clearly speaks for all of those young gents (as I’ve no doubt most of them are) who strongly dislike the work and whimsy of Alain de Botton, ought to have the courage of his animus, and express himself plainly instead of resorting to  condescending snark. Ha! Now there’s no need for you to click throught to this week’s Book Review review.

How about this: the world is divided into two groups. Photographers who like to include people in their compositions and photographers like me who wish that everyone would stay at home. Just staying out of the frame isn’t good enough; I see best when no one is around. When I’m trying to think, the presence of other people is cripplingly distracting.

Which certainly makes New York City an exciting place for taking pictures!

This picture would have been pretty good (allowing for its many technical imperfections, notably a slight blur due to palsy), if only the fourth finger of my left hand hadn’t been doing its thing, hovering over the lens (not shown). Here’s “what I saw”:

So, knowing how I could crop the shot, the obtrusion didn’t really matter. But if I’d wanted to use the whole image, I’d have been in for a long wait, because the emptiness proved to be totally momentary. Head bobbed up from below; worse, bodies coming in from the left blocked the view. It isn’t that I wanted to take a picture of a “deserted” subway station entrance. It’s just that the entrance interested me because, deserted, it was visible.

After Public Enemies, which Kathleen, LXIV, and I saw at the Union Square Thetre, and a nice long lunch at the Knickerbocker, I headed up to Union Square by myself, to take some snaps for next week’s Daily Offices. It was an assignment that I was prepared not to enjoy. There were a lot of people in the park, and they all looked alike: young. Given the location, what did I expect? People my age still regard Union Square as the ideal place in which to catch a disease, possibly death. It seems quite safe now, but the presence too many young people is as off-putting as that of too many old people. En masse, demographic groups always look their worst. All one can think of (vis-à-vis crowds of young people) is the flood of rude health and easy beauty, thrown away on minds that are either callow or naive. Young people of both types think that they know a thing or two about the world, and they’re right, but they don’t know very much about themselves. Such as, for example, the remorseless dispatch with which time is going to steal the unearned benefits of being twenty-one.

The upshot is that a park full of young people is almost as depressing as a mausoleum.

Almost but not quite. When my quiver of images was tolerably full, I contentely blocked that view with my very own self and was soon speeding homeward.

What do I find on page 6 of the latest from P D James, The Private Patient, but the following:

Her father’s periodic bouts of violence were unpredictable.

Oh dear. “Her father’s periodic bouts of violence were intolerable” would have been equally wrong — assuming that the father was, indeed, an unpredictable human being — but I might not have caught it. I’m amazed that no editor did. “Sporadic” would have been better; it’s at least correct. But surely way to fix this sentence is to join it with the first half of the following one:

Her father’s unpredictable bouts of violence meant that no school friends could safely be brought home, no birthday or Christmas parties arranged. And, since no invitations were ever given, none was received.

The Private Patient is really the most clever old thing. It involves (so far) a successful Harley Street plastic surgeon who runs a private clinic in the country. How’s that for up-to-date? I almost wish that Ian McEwan would bring back Henry Perowne to write a parody, because Private Patient is totally not up-to-date. It’s a wonderful old creaker. The clinic has been fitted into an old half-timbered manor house, with gates that close and mysterious rocks in the garden, where a witch was once burned. No crime has been committed — yet. A plastic surgeon in a remote country house — paging Dr Frankenstein?

update: In fact, however, the Gothic tease is soon thrown off, to reveal a ripping yarn about the consequences of plagiarism.

 

Clippings virumque cano.

What I want to know — but without lifting a finger to find out — is why I was so fascinated, way back in the Spring of 2001, with New Jersey’s Miranda Imbroglio. No, you’re right — I wouldn’t know what I was talking about, either, if I hadn’t unearthed a shoal of clippings about the matter this afternoon.

Let me take you back: Christie Whitman, then the Republican governor, resigned to take a cabinet position in the new Bush Administration (she wouldn’t last). This made Donald DiFrancesco, the President of the New Jersey State Senate, Acting Governor. The state constitution required that he remain president of the Senate. This meant that the powerful Mr DiFrancesco had a lot of enemies.

I can’t remember why Mr DiFrancesco wanted to appoint Isabel Miranda, a former Citibank executive, to serve as state treasurer. And I’m not going to try to find out now! David Halbfinger’s story in the Times (3-26-01) will have to do:

Isabel Miranda, who was named treasurer of New Jersey on March 19 and took over as acting treasurer on Friday, was director of trusts and estates for Citibank’s private banking unit until 1996, when, the co-workers say, she was forced to resign and immediately escorted from her office in the Citicorp tower in Midtown Manhattan.

The co-workers said Ms. Miranda was fired after auditors found evidence that she and Donald R. Browne Jr., an executive in Citibank’s San Francisco office who later transferred to New York, had charged the bank for frequent cross-country trips to visit each other and for trips together to places like Palm Beach, Fla.

There must have been a cherchez-la-femme aspect to this story that I found pungent at the time. But Ms Miranda’s misadventures have been buried by thick sediments of 9/11, James McGreevy, and Albany follies from Spitzer to Espada. (Here in the Tri-State area, we can deal with only one dysfunctional statehouse at a time.) The lights went out on this story in my brain a long time ago. I could remember, handling the clippings, that I’d been fascinated by it, but I hadn’t a clue as to why. Even now that I’ve glanced over Mr Halbfinger’s three-page story, I haven’t a clue as to why.

***

I still don’t know when exactly it was that I launched Portico, but I believe that it was during Y2K. So, when the DiFrancesco/Miranda story was in the news, my familiarity with Web publishing was still rudimentary. I mention this because I don’t think that it had occurred to me yet that a political story transpiring in New Jersey was something that I might ever write about. I was clipping the Times’s stories about it simply because they interested me, and I thought that, at some critical point in the future, it would be fun to haul out the old news and point to the details that, now, in this hypothetical future, would shimmer with iridescent significance. That critical moment never came. Other critical points supervened.

***

Getting rid of clippings has been on the agenda for a while now.  The deliberations have been complicated — if you don’t believe me, just remember “Times Select” — but the salient point here is that I don’t need the reminders that newspaper clippings can provide. I know this because they never provided me with any reminders, and that for the simple reason that I never consulted them. Once tucked away in their folders, the clippings entered the state of suspended existence experienced by all those knick-knacks on the Titanic. Unlike said knick-knacks, the clippings lacked any and all intrinsic interest.

There was one extrinsic interest that they might have developed, however, and this dire possibility made it imperative to get rid of the things. I’ve neglected to mention until right now that the two well-stuffed accordion folders that I finished purging this afternoon contained clippings from the Summer of 2o00 to the Summer of — 2002. I was certainly at the height of my newspaper-clipping powers back in those critical years!  But just think: what if I became famous (posthumously, of course), and scholars discovered those accordion files? You know what scholars are! The Clippings of RJ Keefe: 2000-2002. Once they’d dealt with my choice of 9/11/Terrorism articles, and my phonebook-thick sheaf of plush about The Producers (all tossed today, except for the one with the Hirschfeld drawing. Hirschfeld!), they’d speculate about my “unaccountable interest in New Jersey politics.” Couldn’t have that!

***

I did find one clipping that shimmered with iridescent significance. It was so shimmeringly significant that I almost broke down in tears. Among the many Paul Krugman columns that I cut out of the Times before finally realizing that (a) I agreed with Mr Krugman on all points and (b) it would more convenient to collect his thoughts in book form, even though (c) this turned out to be unnecessary, given the whizbang Times site, which nobody could have imagined back then, was the following, “Passing The Buck” (3 September 2002).

In his keynote speech at last week’s Jackson Hole conference, Mr. Greenspan offered two excuses. First, he claimed that it wasn’t absolutely clear, even during the manic market run-up of 1999, that something was amiss: “it was very difficult to definitively identify a bubble until after the fact — that is, when its bursting confirmed its existence.” Second, he claimed that the Fed couldn’t have done anything anyway. “Is there some policy that can at least limit the size of a bubble and, hence, its destructive fallout? . . . the answer appears to be no.”

I wasn’t alone in finding this speech disturbingly evasive. As The Financial Times noted, policy makers always have to act on limited information: “The burden of proof for a central bank should not be absolute certainty.” The editorial also reminded readers that while Mr. Greenspan may now portray himself as skeptical but powerless during the bubble years, at the time many saw him as a cheerleader. “The Fed chairman . . . may well have contributed to the explosion of exuberance in the late 1990’s with his increasingly bullish observations.”

Moreover, there is evidence that Mr. Greenspan actually knew better. In September 1996, at a meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee, he told his colleagues, “I recognize that there is a stock market bubble problem at this point.” And he had a solution: “We do have the possibility of . . . increasing margin requirements. I guarantee that if you want to get rid of the bubble, whatever it is, that will do it.”

Yet he never did increase margin requirements, that is, require investors to put up more cash when buying stocks.

You’ll note that Mr Krugman (and, presumably, the Financial Times) uses the C word: cheerleader. If only Alan Greenspan’s tenure at the Federal Reserve could be as murkily lost to the mists of time as the machinations of Donald DiFrancesco, what a much happier world this would be! I have no doubt of it. I had no doubt of it when I clipped Mr Krugman’s column.

¶ Matins: It appears that the Plain People have been going native, since the last time you saw Witness, anyway. A run on an Amish bank? (via The Morning News)

¶ Lauds:  Things Magazine calls Triangle Triangle “one of those abstract sites that seems to distil whole swathes of contemporary cultural production down into just one or two images.”

¶ Prime: Jay Goltz writes about our idea of very cool wheels: the 2010 Ford Transit Connect.

¶ Tierce: More Madoff fallout: J Ezra Merkin will have to sell his $310 million worth of art.

¶ Sext: Hey! It’s just not true: Coca Cola + MSG ≠ aphrodisiac! The idea! And what about the story that metal objects dissolve in Coke? (via The Awl)

¶ Nones: Does the proposed withdrawal of all 27 EU ambassadors from Iran sound like a good idea to you? Not to us, it doesn’t.

¶ Vespers: Emma Garman writes irresistibly about Françoise Mallet-Joris’s The Illusionist (Le Rempart des Béguines, 1951), showing how it goes “one better’ than Françoise Sagan’s much better-known Bonjour, Tristesse.

¶ Compline: Flash from the Past: George Frazier’s truly astonishing liner notes to Miles Davis’s Greatest Hits (1965): forget the blues, man; how’s my suit?

¶ Bon weekend à tous! Read the rest of this entry »

Today was the day that the New York Times wasn’t delivered — anywhere. I exaggerate, certainly. But, still…

I thought it was just me, of course, when Kathleen reported the missingness of the Times at the door this morning. (The relevant credit card expired a few months ago, and I never bothered to provide a new expiration date; then again, I was never asked to do so.) When I called the newspaper’s 800 number, however, I was immediately informed of a “production delay.” I was also assured that the paper would be delivered by noon. That did not happen.

I thought it was just me “of course” because  I really did let my subscription to The New Yorker lapse. Now, how did that happen? I don’t remember throwing away any of the hundreds of the reminders notices that invariably precede such dire cut-offs. I used to be terribly about that sort of thing, but now that I am an old dodderer with nothing better to do, I open “renewal notices” right away. I can’t think what happened with the only really important magazine in the world that I take.

That’s pretty much it for today. The newspaper didn’t come. I had bought this week’s issue of The New Yorker at the newsstand across the street on Monday. I didn’t miss the Times, really. I read online most of what I would have read shuffling through the broadsheet; what I missed was the Opinion, which I never look at online unless I’m linking to something. It was not the end of the world, not getting the paper. I guess that that’s how the world ends; but then I don’t want to sound like a toad in warm water.

Oh, I did ask for some help with Corel’s WinDVD software. I had never figured out how to capture images with the latest version of the program. It turned out to be simpler than I dreamed. So often, that’s the problem.

¶ Matins: At last! Jason Epstein’s dream of books-on-demand will be getting a serious try-out, using the Espresso Book Machine (made by a company that Mr Epstein founded), in Manchester Center, Vermont. You must watch the video! (via Arts Journal)

¶ Lauds: Architect Michael Sorkin appraises Manhattan as a pedestrian town, and tries to think of buildings to suit.

¶ Prime: More about Chris Anderson’s Free: from Mr Anderson himself, at The Long Tail; and, in not so loyal opposition, from Choire Sicha, at The Awl and from Brian, at Survival of the Book. A new digital divide?

¶ Tierce: A star is born: Lisa Maria Falcone, formerly a person with money (and, more formerly, a person with no money), seeks a place in Gotham’s philanthropic firmament. A Cinderella story — adjusted for real time.

¶ Sext: We don’t know whether to laugh or to shudder at this Sixty Minutes segment about fMRI mind-reading.

¶ Nones: In futures trading on Iraqi stability, China gains access and standing in the petroleum business — aided by the American Senate.

¶ Vespers: Watch that Tweet! In case you don’t “follow” Alice Hoffman — provoked, over the weekend. by an unfavorable review of her new novel, The Story Sisters, into an authorial “meltdown” — you can real all about it at Salon. (via Arts Journal)

¶ Compline: The always thoughtful Richard Crary considers Michael Jackson, at The Existence Machine.

So I find myself listening to songs I’ve known forever for really the first time, in my own time, paying attention to stuff I’ve taken for granted. And the main thing I’m struck by is the evident rage and pain in Michael’s vocals.

Read the rest of this entry »

The thing is, I’m married to Sheherazade. Only, my wife has updated the job description to suit herself. I’m the one who does the talking. This is not something that I am unwilling to do, as you may have inferred from hints here and there. But she gets to listen.

Decapitation is not a risk, but when Kathleen has had enough, she excuses herself from the table. This doesn’t mean that I’ve begun to bore her; it just means that she has had enough. She asks questions. Sometimes I don’t know the answers — that’s why netbooks were invented. Sometimes her question opens a floodgate of talk. The subject is almost always history of some kind: what happened to other people some time ago. Kathleen hated history in school, and insists that she learned nothing. She also — how Sheherazade is this — insists that, if I had been her teacher, she would have loved history. I make the people so real, she says. It is true that a number of the prominent figures — disproportionately kings, cardinals, and trouble-making aristocrats — are almost as familiar to me as people whom I “actually know.” They are certainly more familiar to me than they are to a rather small number of lives in being. Every time I talk about them to Kathleen, I get to know them a little better, and not just because I’m making stuff up as I go along.

Kathleen’s conversational manner at the dinner table, then, is quite colossally flattering to me. To say that I am quite aware of this is not to deny that I am, effectively, as flattered as buttered toast.

If Kathleen does not find my disquisitions on inquisitions difficult to follow, that is because she spends her days running inquisitions of her own, into faulty and misleading legal instruments. Years of explaining and anticipating the actions of the Securities and Exchange Commission have made her rather like the ambassadors whom Venice planted at all the major Renaissance courts, suave analysts of the bottom line who knew how to ask serious questions without seeming to be rude. I make it sound glamorous, but Kathleen’s dealings do not take place in Palladian arcades. They wearyingly transpire, for the most part, on telephones and computer screens. After a day of that, it seems, it’s a pleasure to come home and listen to me chatter about Venetian diplomats at Renaissance courts. She feels the kinship to those long-dead diplomats, but she doesn’t have to know the people. Knowing about them is entertaining.

Considering the documents that Kathleen edits by the hour, my complicated sentences, in spite of being saturated with dependent clauses and parenthetical asides, are so much syntactical finger-painting. As I say, my idea of history is a matter of personalities. It is always and only about distinct individuals, so that, instead of forces and trends, there are fashions and anxieties. Despite the complexity — the occasional hypertrophism — of my verbiage, it is usually not abstract, but rather about a specific somebody who was once worried sick about making the right impression (or who ought to have been). They are just like Kathleen’s clients, except that, wonderfully, they are not her clients.

I sometimes have reason to suspect that my wife’s interest in what I have to say has rendered me unfit for general conversation. And there is something else that you ought to know about Kathleen.

She loves to hear me whistle along with Mozart, Verdi, et al. No, I didn’t believe it, either. But it’s true.

¶ Matins: Ben Flanner’s Rooftop Farms, in Greenpoint, is six thousand square feet of vegetables — atop an industrial building.

¶ Lauds: At Speakeasy, Jim Fusilli asks if there will ever be another Michael Jackson. He’s not talking about artistry, really, but rather about the business. His answer is that not even Michael Jackson at his prime could sell 750 million albums today.

¶ Prime: Malcolm Gladwell reviews Chris Anderson’s Free; Tom Scocca and Choire Sicha have a laff.

¶ Tierce: Bernard Madoff was sentenced to one hundred fifty years in prison today, but as far as victim Burt Ross is concerned, that’s not even the beginning of what’s appropriate. “When he leaves this earth vitually unmourned, may Satan grow a fourth mouth…” The reference is to Canto XXXIV of Inferno.

¶ Sext: Being Tyler Brûlé, a blog that makes exquisite fun of (Jayson) Tyler Brûlé. (via Things Magazine)

¶ Nones: It’s rather maddening, but I can’t confirm my hunch that the ouster of Honduran president Manuel Zelaya was engineered by the “European” elites that own most of the property in Central America. Update

¶ Vespers: John Self writes about Marilynne Robinson’s first novel, Housekeeping (1981). If you missed it, Mr Self may whet your appetite for a fine novel.

¶ Compline: V X Sterne is back, at Outer Life, and it will surprise none of his regular readers that he unplugged the second flat-screen monitor that was recently installed at his place of business.

Read the rest of this entry »

In the kitchen, I’ve been watching Woody Allen’s Manhattan. What this means is that the little TV/DVD player in the kitchen gets paused a lot, while I go off to do something else — sometimes for hours. (I turn the machine off overnight, and it picks right up when I turn it back on.) It’s a very personal way of watching movies, and, to tell the truth, “watching” doesn’t come into it much. It would be better to say that I listen. With vintage Woody Allen, needless to say, this works very well; the jokes don’t seem as appliquéd to the cinematic texture — which, in Manhattan, is extraordinary.

Manhattan is one of the three pivotal movies that Mr Allen made in the late Seventies; Interiors and Stardust Memories are the others. All three are unrestrained imitations of movies by Fellini and Bergman. Not imitations of particular movies, and not imitations in the cheesy “bad” sense, but imitations in the old classic sense, as in “Imitation of Horace” (a poem in the style of Quintus Horatius Flaccus). Visually, they are all extremely successful; dramatically, the tension between the intense look and feel that Mr Allen adopted from the Europeans and the cheeky dialogue of the two black-and-white films is difficult for some Allen fans, while the way too serious, out-Bergmaning Bergman tone of Interiors dares viewers to be bored. Neither Manhattan nor Stardust Memories, however, is an overlooked stepchild.

The grandeur of Manhattan owes a great deal to a third partner: in addition to the great screenplay (written with Marshall Brickman) and Gordon Willis’s gorgeous cinematography, the music is by George Gershwin, and I wish I could say who orchestrated it. (The selections all seem to come from the overtures to Gershwin’s Broadway shows.) What Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff did for an idea of old Russia, Gershwin does for the New York City that still existed in 1979. Mr Allen’s virtuoso use of some of Gershwin’s most romantic tunes, especially as hymns to the sweetness of the young Mariel Hemingway, is just about operatic.

But even though nothing visual about the film is particularly jarring to anyone familiar with today’s city — the cars look a bit out-of-date, but then cars always do — the feeling of everything is somehow different. The Manhattan of Manhattan is a more innocent, more integrated, and strangely less self-conscious place. Manhattan was the first movie to make the visual proposition that New York City is the sophisticated equal of London, Paris, Rome, and the other great capitals that Americans are too provincial to know about. It was a new idea in 1979, and very exciting. Woody Allen made a persuasive case. Nowadays, though, it’s hard to believe that the argument ever needed to be advanced.

Kathleen and I saw Manhattan when it came out — in South Bend, Indiana, where we were finishing up law school. The following year, Kathleen would take a studio apartment in the building that we live in to this day. The fact that we have stayed put has only made the city’s changes more obvious. To mention just one dossier: when we arrived, Eighty-Sixth Street was still the main street of the old Germantown, lined with restaurants such as the Ideal and the Kleine Konditorei. The Old Dutch delicatessen had a sign in the window: “this is NOT a kosher delicatessen.” (Or words to that effect.) For a long time afterward, the space was occupied by a kosher delicatessen. Now, it’s a bakery.

The interesting structure that the German department store, Bremen House, built for itself in the Eighties is now a Pizzeria Uno. (Some of us remember the day that Bremen House didn’t open. It never really closed.) Next door, the tenants at the Ventura apartments must be very unhappy, because all of the building’s vast retail space is vacant. Circuit City was in the basement, and Barnes & Noble has consolidated at a new location nearer to Lexington Avenue. That’s a lot of dried-up revenue stream! Such worries were unknown in 1980.

Come to think of it, thirty years is the life span of most traditional mortgages: a long time in anybody’s book. If I had watched a thirty year-old movie when my daughter was born, it might well have been The Palm Beach Story. Yikes! I wasn’t thirty years old at the time, and PBS might as well have been scripted by Aristophanes as by Preston Sturges — if I’d known about it, which I didn’t. (As it happened, though, I was mad about some movies that were pushing forty, all starring Fred Astaire.) Manhattan, at whatever age, will retain the poignance of having captured New York as it was when I came back to the town I was born in.

I’ll close on a dark note. I’m not entirely sure, but I believe that, in the montage that introduces Manhattan, not one of the loving scenes of the city shows the World Trade Center. I am almost certain that the WTC does not appear in the movie at all. That is very much how we felt about those towers, not just in 1979, but, even more strongly, when they were built. I wonder if, thirty years from now, anyone will remember how deeply New Yorkers felt that a pair of unimaginative spindles had let them all down. Not to mention how we felt, very quietly, later on.

¶ Matins: What is intelligence? Are there kinds of intelligence? Christopher Ferguson, at Chron Higher Ed, reminds us of the question’s politico-pedagogical nature.

¶ Lauds: At The Best Part, some pictures by Brett Amory.

¶ Prime: Jay Goltz poses a superbly sticky problem in business ethics that, unlike most such puzzles, has no leading dramatic edge to nudge you in the “correct” direction. Give it a think!

¶ Tierce: “Welcome to the flip side of homophobia.”

¶ Sext: Things to do with dead Metro cards, at Infrastructurist.

¶ Nones: Why is it so hard to find Osama bin Laden? Just think of the money that has been spent on the manhunt. Julian Borger and Declan Walsh outline the difficulties — and the limitations of whizbang technology — at the Guardian.

¶ Vespers: According to Martin Schneider, at Emdashes, Michael Jackson appeared three times in The New Yorker over the years. I expect that the number would have been rather higher if Tina Brown had taking over the editor’s job about ten years earlier.

¶ Compline: Everyday depression may be a survival tactic of sorts, by reducing motivation to pursue unrealizable goals. Conversely, the American ethos’s valorzation of persistence in the face of obstacles may explain why this country leads the world for clinical depression.  Read the rest of this entry »

What might have been a lovely weekend was bruised on Saturday morning by an unexpected encounter. As Kathleen and I were walking out to have breakfast at the coffee shop across the street, there in the makeshift lobby was a member of the building’s tenants’ association. He was seated at a card table, and he was soliciting signatures for a petition. The petition opposes the MTA’s plans to plant an entrance to the Second Avenue subway right in front of our building. Opposition to the MTA and its works has been simmering here for years, and it has always struck me as the rankest NIMBYism. But I’ve never investigated the issue for myself. The very fact that there was a vocal opposition to the proposed subway entrance meant that I was for it.

The committee member, whom I chat with occasionally, was genuinely surprised when I announced, with one of those smirks that make you want to hit somebody, that I was “on the MTA’s side.” This idiotic remark was true only in the sense that the enemy of my enemies is my friend, for the tenant’s association is my enemy. Okay, not my enemy. But I don’t approve of it. I don’t believe that such groups are effective or, if effective, intelligent. I do not, on the personal level, believe in democracy at all.

It was unpleasant to be reminded of how thoroughly uncooperative I can be, especially when I am asked to be cooperative. The acid reflux revives the dread that I had, throughout childhood, of ever having to serve in a military unit. I knew that the only outcome of military service for me would a court-martial proceeding triggered by my gross insubordination, and then death by firing squad. Even the Boy Scouts, then a rather genial organization, was far too regimented for me.

You might think that I display high levels of cooperativeness just by walking down 86th Street in an attentive way, and by doing all the other little things that make dense city life bearable, but you would be wrong. I am Setting An Example. Abominable conceit is what it is. And when this abominable conceit isn’t functioning, I can be sociopathically surly.

Kathleen signed, of course — on the way back. We did not discuss it. I knew that my resistance was a matter of private pathology.

 last Week at Portico: ¶ I loved it so much the first time, I took Kathleen to see it the very next day: in my humble opinion, Anne Fletcher’s The Proposal is the best film (so far) of 2009. I wish it had come out in January, because then I should have made the same statement, idiotic though it be to claim a best picture in the first month of the year, simply in honor of Pauline Kael’s 1978 choice of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. In my humble opinion, Pauline Kael was visually tone-deaf, too political a mentality to discuss any branch of art. The damage wrought by her influence will take at least another ten years to purge. ¶ What did you make of Stephen O’Connor’s short story in this week’s New Yorker, “Ziggurat“? I got so little out of it that I probably ought to have remained silent; but I will say that I did not dislike it. ¶ Kate Christensen’s Trouble, her fifth novel, is definitely a book for the second read (just as The Proposal, like all of Hitchcock, is meant for the second viewing), which makes it difficult to talk about — it seems so much simpler than it is, and yet the anatomy of its artful composition would be worse than useless to first-time readers. So let me just give it a rave. ¶ My friend Vestal McIntyre’s Lake Overturn gets the best (highest-quality) review in this week’s Book Review, but, wouldn’t you know, it appears in one of those infernal roundups.

Hurray and Hallelujah! After the first installment of Lewis: Season 2, Kathleen asked for a second. So we watched that, and now it is all hours, and I can no longer remember what happened today.

Lewis, as I shouldn’t have to tell you, is the successor to Morse. Everything about the original series has been turned upside down (or at least brought up to date). Now, instead of working for a nob, Lewis has one working for him, in the person of Hathaway (Laurence Fox). The ghastly boss is a woman now, and she’s just as impossible although not quite so horribly hostile as she was in the pilot. The show leaves me trying to figure out how to go to Oxford in a non-touristic manner, such that I might be taken seriously there as a wit and a scholar, or at least as a literate American, and not as a tourist. I don’t work too hard at it, because my attempt to do the same thing on the Internet has yet to bear fruit.

***

At some point in the afternoon, Kathleen’s secretary told me how much she had loved The Hangover. I have learned that we have very different opinions about movies, and I was hesitant about recommending The Proposal, because, frankly, I don’t want to hear how somebody hated it. But perhaps it will help us settle into being one another’s Manohla Dargis: “If he likes it, I’m not even going to think about seeing it.” As soon as I got home from seeing The Hangover, I wrote a series of notes about the film. A move that made a lot of sense, you’ll say. But in fact I did it so that I could preserve my snarkiness about the movie at its ultramost. I couldn’t wait for it to end, I didn’t dislike it. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

***

At seven o’clock I saw that (a) I had done all the writing that could even unreasonably be expected of me and (b) I had no photographs in stock for next week’s Daily Office. So I took the tripod and the Coolpix down to Carl Schurz Park. I did not collapse the tripod beforehand but carried it fully extended —  pitifully short. I want a tripod that will see what I see, all six foot three of me. 

The Park was heaven. I couldn’t believe how pleasant it was to stand on the edge of the East River in the wake of a violent thunderstorm, snapping pictures without having to worry that they’d be blurry. I felt so free! An hour between writing and cooking — all mine. I was stoned without being stoned. Marijuana would have gotten in the way; it would also have been superfluous.

***

I have noticed, over the past couple of  years, an interesting gay trope: “He’s so attractive [on whatever level] that you either want to fuck him or to be him.” I have given a lot of thought to the “being him” option. I used to think that that’s how I felt about men I really admired: I wanted to take their place; I wanted, vulgo, to be “them.” In fact, however, the only time that I have ever wanted to be anybody else was when The Avengers was a new show, and I was in my early teens: surely there was hope that I might blossom into the kind of guy that Diana Rigg would like to hang out with.

Since then, I have certainly admired a lot of men in a covetous way. Watching Ryan Reynolds in The Proposal, I want to kick myself. It was never in the cards that I would be as generally appealing as Mr Reynolds, but appealing more particularly to people who knew me was never a problem. The problem was that I was not interested in being an appealing person, and that is what I should like to go back and change. I don’t want to be Ryan Reynolds. I just wish that I had given him some competition, as I would have done had (a) he been my age (and now old and a wreck like me) and (b) my head had not been conducting a colonoscopy. I wish that I had understood how wonderful it is to have people like you. I did not understand this when I was a teenager. I didn’t think that anybody really liked anybody. That was a cruel mistake.

***

One of the Lewis episodes was really about the Stasi. It tempted you into thinking that it was about boxing at Oxford — or maybe it didn’t; the hour was very late. But it was definitely about snitching. My fundamental existential problem is that I wish that I could stage a show trial in which all of Bronxville (the village in which I grew up) would be revealed as ghastly and hypocritical, blah blah blah; my feelings haven’t changed since childhood. But the defendants in this trial, I know, would throw up their hands and ask what they’d done wrong, even now, even today. They’d say, “what’s he complaining about?” They’re still, in the persons of their children, living the same lives today. What was wrong? I was wrong. 

When I first saw the supermarket tabloid headlines about Farrah Fawcett, I thought, but for only a nanosecond, that it was a terrible joke. Then I remembered that this was how Lee Remick died, plus many since. And that is the tragedy.

My principal recollection of Farrah Fawcett is Spalding Gray’s mention of auditioning with her, in Terrors of Pleasure. Check it out; if nothing else, it will suggest why, if you are reading this, you have no future in front of a camera.

As far as Charlie’s Angels goes, I didn’t watch the show very often — I was already well into my TV withdrawal — but, when I did, I was a staunch Kate Jackson fan. I like smart women who keep their clothes on in public. I also like smart men who keep their clothes on in public. There are statues for that! And private rooms for the lucky few.

I once had an argument with a friend that took the strangest turn. He was rather ecstatically remembering the ecstasies of a particularly well-appointed pole-dancing bar in Atlanta. I didn’t get it: I don’t want to look at anything that I can’t touch. This is, it seems, a minority view. Lots of people really do like window shopping. Pas moi. When confronted by attractive but seriously underdressed young people, I’m distressed on behalf of their parents. “I guess it was easier for her to change her name than for her whole family to change theirs.”

Anyway, and I don’t mean this uncharitably, the word “airhead” has always conjured that famous picture of Farrah Fawcett. This isn’t because I ever thought that the actress was dimwitted, but rather because it had to be air up there; anyone with that much hair wouldn’t have been able to hold her head up.

Speaking of smart women, Jenny Diski’s piece about Nina Simone in the current LRB is Ms Diski at her best. It’s amply about the great singer of “My Baby Just Cares For Me,” but it’s also about Jenny Diski — in the way that the recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking are all about French Cooking — but also about Julia Child. I must confess to some dismaying S & M fantasies involving Jenny Diski. Smart and fully clothed, she berates me from high table. “Bourgeois swine!” That sort of thing — and richly deserved. But then comes the part that sends me over the moon. “Now, go make me an omelette.” Yes, ma’am! The first thing I do when a new issue of the London Review of Books arrives is to check the table of contents for my favorite byline.

Then I make an omelette. Just in case. If anything happens to Jenny Diski, you can count on some shameless caterwauling from me.

 ¶ Matins: At Brainiac, Christopher Shea asks about a “blue collar renaissance.” He has been reading Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft, of course. Somewhat more solid evidence that the scope of “knowledge worker” is expanding appears in Louis Uchitelle’s Times story, “Despite Recession, High Demand for Skilled Labor.”

¶ Lauds: At The House Next Door, Shelby Button reports on the deadCENTER Film Festival, in Oklahoma City.

¶ Prime: Robb Mandelbaum traces a small-business-friendly amendment to the Credit Cardholder’s Bill of Rights Act — and speculates on its demise.

¶ Tierce: When mom forgot his 73rd birthday, Tony Marshall was quick to call the doctor and complain about her growing “confusion.”

¶ Sext: At Inside Higher Ed, Ben Elson reports on the number one problem affecting Americans today: student parking. (via The Awl)

¶ Nones: What? There are Somalian Members of Parliament? Still? Fewer and fewer, perhaps — but that there are any is surprising.

¶ Vespers: Rebecca Steinitz, at The Rumpus, writes so alluringly about Julia Strachey’s Cheerful Weather for a Wedding (1932) that I’ve just ordered a copy.

¶ Compline: In The New Yorker, Jill Lepore draws a distinction between parenthood and adulthood. An important distinction — don’t you think?

¶ Bon weekend à tous!

Read the rest of this entry »

How can I claim to have had a productive day when I didn’t get anything done — anything beyond le minimum,  that is.

***

Speaking French, let’s not forget to mention the six photographs that Jean Ruaud put up at Mnémoglyphes today. I know, I know — you get it: we think that Jean is one of the best photographers who ever snapped a shutter. But this is not about Jean. This is about six beautiful images. Three pairs, really: two transcendental clichés, touristic images that, for a change, succeed at being interesting as well as beautiful — but very beautiful. Then, two shop windows, one with a peacock (or lyre bird? guinea hen?), and one with a rag doll or two — and both of them loaded with reflections and other “irrelevant” information. (I wonder who’s having the sale across the street from the bird.)

Finally, two quiet street scenes with patches of sun — and (oh! ) the surprising shadow of a lanterne. Perhaps it is simply age on my part, but I do not envy Jean’s ability; I do not wish that I might have taken these pictures. It’s quite enough that they were taken, never mind by whom. That they were taken by a good friend is, I insist, incidental. Although it is true that, as he has been a good friend for a few years, I have the habit of giving his photographs my complete attention. And how rewarded am I now!

***

For dinner, Kathleen was ready to try chicken soup again. I took a box of College Inn that I keep in the fridge and poured it all into a saucepan — uneconomical, I know, but I happened not to have any cans on hand. Then I cut off a slice of mirepoix and tossed it in with the broth. This I warmed over the lowest heat possible, for hours. When Kathleen announced that she was coming home, I brought another saucepan of water to the boil and cooked a third of a cup of orzo, Kathleen’s favorite pasta. I served the homely results on Royal Worcester that we bought before we were married, along with a glass of water and a stainless ice-cream compote of lime Jell-O.

Never mind what I had. It was good, but I’m working on it.

***

In the afternoon, I finished Alex Ross’s piece in The New Yorker about Marlboro Music. I began it last night but had to put it down. It was late, but Mr Ross’s deferential treatment of Mitsuko Uchida, one of the co-directors of Marlboro and a very great pianist — and very grand — was waking me up. The sheer niceness of the coverage was putting me in mind of  Club Sonata.  (Think Mickey Mouse and Annette Funicello.)

Wolferl: Gee, Aunt Mitzi, what are we going to do today?

Aunt Mitzi: Well, kiddos, I thought we would explore the Werktreue of “Body and Soul.” Who wants treble?

Franzl: Me! Me!

It was all too wholesome. The redemptive powers of music &c — only, in this case, there didn’t seem to be much need for redemption. If it hadn’t been for David Soyer’s “Property of David Soyer” obsession, Marlboro would have come off as stunningly free of original sin.  

Verily, it is a sublime misfortune, cosmic timing-wise, that Ms Uchida will probably not figure in the gallery of Meryl Streep’s uncanny impersonations.

***

In the evening, there was a reception at the Museum for contributors of our level and up. The nibbles must have been succulent. Bad weather, however, suggested that the Roof Garden was not going to be the most pleasant venue in the city, if indeed it was opened at all. Ms NOLA had a prior engagement, and Nom de Plume was recovering from a chest cold. Kathleen gallantly offered to go, to keep me company, but I didn’t want to go quite that badly myself. So I stayed at home. At six, I chuckled with sagacity: the very air was sodden with misery. But when I looked up from my work at a quarter to eight, things had changed. The air was clear, and the temperature had dropped. When did this happen? Very possibly, too late for the Museum staff to shift gears. But I was sorry, for a full five minutes, that I hadn’t had the fortitude to go by myself.

If I were a normal person, I could count on meeting friends at a place that I regularly frequent, such as the Museum’s previews. In fact, it might have happend; but I couldn’t expect it. There is something about the art of acquaintance that is hidden from me: I don’t know what it is that I don’t have.

***

I did keep my desk tidy, all day. Desks, really — all three of them. If I didn’t get anything done, it’s because I was busy putting everything away.

¶ Matins: Whether or not last week’s election was rigged, the behavior of the Iranian government since the results were disputed has completely discredited it. The Amahdinejad regime’s aggressive clampdown on dissent show no concern whatever for the stability that, in China, in contrast, isalways Topic A. How do we know? Because the Internet tells us so.

¶ Lauds: The face of Penelope Tree seems to be everywhere — at An Aesthete’s Lament, at the Costume Institute’s Model as Muse show — and she’s even mentioned in Brooks Peters’ latest post (see Vespers).

¶ Prime:  Bill Vlasic’s story about Ford family solidarity, in today’s Times, makes us hope that investment portfolios have been diversified over the years. The value of the family’s stock in the company has dropped from $2.2 billion a decade ago to $140 million. At first, the drop seems catastrophic. Then we recollect that $140 million is better than $0.

¶ Tierce: “The man who likes hiding in my home“: Brooke Astor’s description of her son, the defendant, to her Portuguese chauffeur. How gaga is that?

¶ Sext: Ira Lee Sorkin (who used to be a partner of Kathleen’s), has written the most astonishingly chutzpah-tatious letter to Judge Denny Chin, appealing for leniency in the sentencing of his client, Bernard Madoff. That’s the sort of amazing stuff that you pay lawyers to do — and you can see why they’re expensive.

¶ Nones: It will be interesting, to say the least, to heed the impact of French President Sarkozy’s burka ban.

¶ Vespers: Brooks Peters writes about the bookstore that he was inspired to open by Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Bookshop — a novel that, I rather thought, has “do not open a bookshop” written between every line. Happily, Mr Peters’s account is unlikely to mislead any bibliophiles looking to make money doing something that they love.

¶ Compline: Joseph Clarke “Infrastructure for Souls,” at triplecanopy, considers the strong similarities between the megachurch and the office space as they evolved in the later Twentieth Century. (via The Morning News) Read the rest of this entry »

¶ Choice extracts from Lord Chesterfield’s letter of 24 November 1749:

…and were I either to speak or write to the public, I should prefer moderate matter, adorned with all the beauties and elegancies of style, to the strongest matter in the world, ill-worded and ill-delivered.

***

It is a very true saying, that a man must be born a poet, but that he may make himself an orato; and the very first principle of an orator is, to speak his own language particularly, with the utmost purity and elegancy. A man will be forgiven even great errors in a foreign language; but in his own, even the least slips are justly laid hold of and ridiculed.

¶ In Moby-Dick, a chapter of which I’ve often heard mention: “The Doubloon.” I didn’t understand a word, except for the part that I did understand, and that was astrological drivel.

Indeed, Moby-Dick has become an almost toxically depressing experience. How on earth can this dreadful rubbish be so highly regarded? Or regarded at all? It is pulp pure and simple — pulp dressed up in Joseph’s coat of many colors. .

¶ In Don Quixote, an excellent joke. Our hero becomes so engaged by a puppet show about Charlemagne’s son-in-law that he leaps to the aid of the beleaguered knight, laying waste to (pasteboard) Moors.

But this did not keep Don Quixote from raining down slashes, two-handed blows, thrusts, and backstrokes. In short, in less time than it takes to tell about it, he knocked the puppet theatre to the floor, all its scenery and figures cut and broken to pieces: King Marsilio was badly wounded, and Emperor Charlemagne’s head and crown were split in two. The audience of spectators was in a tumult, the monkey ran out the window and onto the roof, the cousin was fearful, the page was frightened, and even Sancho Panza was terrified, because, as he swore when the storm was over, he had never seen his master in so wild a fury. When the general destruction of the puppet theatre was complete, Don Quixote calmed down somewhat and said…

Although Don Quixote pays liberally for the damages, he insists that he was beset by enchanters. Whereas it was only a case of excellent theatre.

¶ In Squillions, Noël Coward goes to the opera.

Went to hear Albanese as Manon Lescaut and it was a grave grave mistake on account of she didn’t ought to have attempted it for several reasons. Time’s Wingèd Chariot being the principal one. She sang most softly and looked like a neckless shrewmouse. Jussi Bjoerling did a Mary Martin and belted the living fuck out of her. He contrived this very subtly by the simple device of gripping her firmly by her shrinking shoulders, turning her bum to the audience and bellowing into her kisser.

Message from the sysop:

The wireless drivers may need a update but im not sure that will fix the weird problems.

To which I replied:

Thanks! Does everyone have the weird problems?

Just checking to see if, you know, all men are mortal.

It was a rough but productive day. I plowed through the problems with a kind of desperate resolution. First of all, there were no links. I sat down to write the Daily Office and filled in three of the eight hours right away. Three hours later, I hadn’t added anything. After lunch, something budged and the logjam broke. I suspect that it was the difficulty of finding a good link for Lauds that put me in a curatorial funk. It was so bad that the best thing that I could come up with was the Schjeldahl–Dyer duel! But the Aesthete came to the rescue, with a gorgeous picture of Penelope Tree.

Then there were the Dymo woes. I wanted to print a lot of labels. Twelve of the labels were for bubble envelopes that I was planning to send to various friends. In the envelopes were twenty or so of the lovely little calendars that Kathleen had printed last December. She was going to send them out to clients as a business Christmas card, but I don’t think that that happened. In March or April, I had the bright idea of foisting a portion of the stockpile off on friends. You see how quickly we move here.

The other labels were for CDs that I’ve removed from jewel boxes and plan to store in lovely file drawers from Exposures.

That is what I was going to do with an hour or two of the afternoon. But the Dymo label printer was in a bad mood. It wasn’t until after I’d rebooted, reinstalled, and installed on another computer that I finally had the idea of pressing one of the blue lights on the printer. That fixed it. There was never at any time a jam. There was just a bad mood.

I persevered. It all got done.

Then there were sign-up issues at YouTube, and the “weird problems.” I want to say that I could cope better with these difficulties if they made any sense, but death and disease don’t make any sense, not really.

*

I read Glenway Wescott’s The Pilgrim Hawk this morning (when I still fancied myself ahead of the curve). I can’t say that I much liked the writing, despite what Michael Cunningham has to say about it.

The same might be said of Wescott the novelist, whose eye is so cold and precise, so hawklike, that the novel itself might suffer from an excess of clarity and a dearth of passion if it weren’t redeemed by its language.

Its language reminds me of a formdible old lady, a humorless veteran of magnificent causes, who lives in a Greenwich Village flat, surrounded by bibelots that, if you’re good, she’ll condescend to explain to you, one by one. What she won’t do is smile from her heart.

Drunkenness does superimpose a certain peculiarity and opaqueness of its own — monotonous complexion, odd aroma, pitch of voice, and nervous twitch — on the rest of a man’s humanity, over the personality that you have known sober. But worse still is the transparency and the revelation, as it were sudden little windows uncurtained, or little holes cut, into common recesses of character. It is an anatomy lesson: behold the ducts and sinuses and bladders of the soul, common to ever soul ever born! Drunken tricks are nothing but basic human traits. Ordinary frame of mind is never altogether unlike this babble of morbid Irishman. I felt the sickish embarrassment of being mere human clay myself. It seems to me that only art has the right to make one feel that. I am inclined to detest anyone who makes me feel it, as you might say, socially.

I’m not entirely sure what all of that means, but the parts that I understand are not attractive.

*

Message from the sysop:

Okay I’ve found information where the newest driver for the wireless card fixes the wireless connection issues.

The bear heads over the mountain, to see what he can see…