“Today, I want to do it on the table!”

Miss Frances. Frances Rappaport Horwich, star — if that’s the word — of Ding Dong School. A show that I watched with recollected docility in the early Fifties. Perhaps the best way to think of Miss Frances is as Mr Rogers’s fairy godmother,  by way of Joe Jervis — qua Ruth Draper’s Mrs Grimmer, of Doctors and Diets, a routine that Joe can recite by rote. (Cue it, Joe!)

A show from this popular series is included in the DVD set, Hiya, Kids!!, which takes its name from another old favorite, Andy’s Gang (“Plunk your magic twanger, Froggie.”). On the one hand, these shows are amazingly innocent of all TV allure. Production values are sub-nil. On the other hand, it is impossible to watch them without imagining their hosts being led away in chains, by federal marshals.

You think I’m joking? Consider this wholesome activity.

The ew factor of this image sent Kathleen into paroxyms of revulsion. I knew that she’d react unfavorably to Ding Dong School, but the extent to which she did so surprised even me.

The commercialization can only be called Nudist. It is that frank. There are two ads for Kix. Both of them feature serving suggestions of which this is the most naive:

There is, strangely, no mention whatsoever of milk, or cream, or water, or any liquid. I suppose that liquid would dampen the crunchiness, which is billed as lasting until “the last spoonful.” The last spoonful in the box, that is. (In those days, nobody worried about how that was managed.) Every time Miss Frances mentions the “crunchy corn” deliciousness of “Kix,” all I can think of is Mrs Grimmer’s trying to squeeze out “the juice of eleven lemons.”

In addition to blowing bubbles, Miss Frances recites poems (by Vachel Lindsay and Robert Louis Stevenson), folds handkerchiefs, and bounces a ball.

I didn’t know that there was such a thing as a child requiring instruction in bouncing a ball.

After all of this edification, Miss Frances summons the parents and/or guardians, bustles the kids out of the room, talks up the handkerchief trick, plugs Kix all over again, and then — this is why you have to buy the DVD — urges her listeners to teach their little ones to “evaluate plans.” Stalinist or anti-Communist? It’s hard to tell.

The good news is that Kathleen has all sorts of new nightmare material, what with Miss Frances and watching Toy Story right afterward.

As for the title of this entry: it refers to a prepubescent joke that I was telling within five or six years of watching Ding Dong School. In those days, five or six years made a completely different man of me; now it only means that I have lived to benefit from more effective medication. Sadly, I still think that this is one of the funniest jokes that I have ever heard. The fun is in the setup, not the punchline. (Actually, the fun is in the souvenir of boyishly imagining that a grown man might conceivably mistake X (Chinese bells) for Y (read on.) That darn keyhole: curse or blessing? If you’re up for some childishness, click on through.

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¶ Matins: Roger Ebert’s complaint about the “CelebCult” — the news about “divorces, addiction, disease, success, failure, death watches, tirades, arrests, hissy fits, scandals” that is killing contemporary journalism at the speed of liver cancer — is remarkable for the quality of comments that it has attracted, most of which are (dauntingly!) worth reading, especially the ones that Mr Ebert has answered.

But when I read Jason Kottke’s entry about the post — Mr Kottke shares Mr Ebert’s dismay — I thought: all very well, but what are we to do? This led me to wonder if a misguided interest in gossip is really the problem.

¶ Tierce: This morning’s Times brings a nice column by David Leonhardt, “Budgets Behaving Badly,” that extends the hope that Barack Obama will staff his administration with behavioral economists. He has already nominated one, Peter Orszag, for budget director.

¶ Compline: Now that the Episcopal Church is finally splitting, with the conservatives abandoning the mother ship for their shriveled-up future, one can only wonder how long it will take American Catholics of conscience to break with Rome in the name of true Christian values.

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When I started reviewing the reviews in the Book Review, in 2005, its contents did not appear online until the publication date. Unaware that this policy had changed, I read most of this week’s reviews thinking that they were leftovers from last week’s edition, which I missed in print, being on vacation.

Which is another way of saying that I wasn’t paying attention last weekend. That’s what vacations are for, isn’t it? And yet I feel curiously guilty. What about last week’s Book Review?

¶ Matins: Aren’t economists great? Now they tell us: “Recession Began Last December, Economists Say.”

¶ Tierce: Pankaj Mishra’s Op-Ed piece, “Fresh Blood From an Old Wound,” throws another log on the fire for resolving territorial disputes, some of which are older than most people alive today. Tibet, Palestine, Kashmir — these vexing contests between arrogant sovereignties and fierce patriots clearly require a unified focus. In their details, these problems differ greatly, but their consequences in the greater world are dismayingly similar. We need a permanent UN Commission to deal with territorial disputes (perhaps there already is one!), or at least to provide a forum for discussing them.

¶ Vespers: George was there: on the 30th anniversary of the assassination of Harvey Milk, George Snyder sat in a theatre in the Castro and watched Sean Penn impersonate the slain civil rights leader.

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Ever since I was in the sixth grade, I’ve seen psychotherapists on and off — mostly on. Two questions: what’s wrong with me? And: isn’t it late in the day for repairs?

Hopeless questions — and beside the point. These days, I want a therapist more than ever. Not a psychotherapist, though. What I want is a delotherapist. (I have just made up the term, using a handy Internet Greek dictionary that is undoubtedly a dangerous thing for ignorant minds like mine.) In English: a clear doctor. Someone who would help me to navigate my day.

I don’t mean one of those organizers who come in and tell you to throw everything out. I can do that on my own. Well, not entirely on my own. LXIV has been a great help at getting me to cart stuff that I can live without to Housing Works. We made a couple of trips yesterday, in fact. First we took about twenty books. Then we lugged in some inherited items: two large wooden urns and a pair of gilt candlesticks.

No, I mean an Information Therapist. Someone to whom I could pour out my troubles with email, RSS feeds, Flickr, Facebook and The New York Times (print and digital). The weedy tendencies of these utilities seems at times to choke off more valuable growths. By habit, I am not a procrastinator. But I have a hard time switching focus between the long and the short view of things. I think that almost everyone does. A lot of time gets wasted in the shift from mastering some new technological widget to placing the Mumbai massacre in an intelligent perspective.

On Sunday, in the middle of a massive and really very successful reorganization of our apartment’s closets — I can’t believe that I got so much done! — my vocabulary and reading-comprehension skills dropped below kindergarten levels. With my mind locked into solving spatial problems, I was reduced, in my infrequent and somewhat subhuman exchanges with Kathleen, to grunting and pointing.

A session on the couch would be so helpful! First I’d have to clear it off, though. It’s completely covered with piles of books and papers.

¶ Matins: The story of McGeorge Bundy’s career as a presidential adviser, told now by Gordon M Goldstein (who worked with Bundy during the last year of his life on a collaborative project that had to be shelved when Bundy’s widow withdrew her support), promises to be a powerful cautionary tale about the limits of early brilliance. Dean of faculty at Harvard at the age of 34, Bundy was all but doomed by his precocity (and his impeccably WASP bloodlines) to trust his innate intelligence more than anyone else’s experience. That such a man counseled two presidents to forge ahead violently in Vietnam would hardly be more horrifying if we learned that Bundy was in fact a vampire who fed on soldiers’ blood.

Richard Holbrooke, who was in the room at the height of Bundy’s influence, reviews Mr Goldstein’s book, saying, “On the long shelf of Vietnam books, I know of nothing quite like it.”

¶ Prime: Who’d a thunk it? According to Brian Stelter’s story, “A Generation of Local TV Anchors Is Signing Off,” just over half of Americans watch local TV news regularly, compared to the 34% who read newspapers and the (only!) 29% who watch network news.

¶ Tierce: Thanks to kottke.org, I’ve just discovered a very promising blog: A Historian’s Craft, kept by “fledgling historian” Rachel Leow. In “Only Collect,” she observes that the only way to become a good hunter of information is to begin voraciously and indiscriminately.

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From the beginning of the third and final part of Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland:

But nobody here holds on to such notions for very long. The rain soon becomes emblematic. The double-deckers lose their elephants’ charm. London is what it is. In spite of a fresh emphasis on architecture and an endless influx of can-do Polish plumbers, in spite, too, of the Manhattanish importance lately attached to coffee and sushi and farmers’ markets, in spite even of the disturbance of 7/7 — a frightening but not a disorienting occurrence, it turns out — Londoners remain in the business of rowing their boats gently down the stream. Unchanged, accordingly, is the general down-the-hatch, who-are-we-fooling lightheartedness that’s aimed at shrinking the significance of our attainments and our doom, and contributes, I’ve speculated, to the bizarrely premature crystallization of lives here, where men and women past the age of forty, in some cases even the age of thirty, may easily be regarded as over the hill and entitled to an essentially retrospective idea of themselves; whereas in New York selfhood’s hill always seemed to lie ahead and to promise a glimpse of further, higher peaks: that you might have no climbing boots on hand was beside the point. As to what this point actually was, I can only say that it involved wistfulness. An example: one lunchtime, Cardozo, mulling over popping the question to his Worcestershire girlfriend, points out a beautiful woman in the street. “I’ll no longer be able to go up to her and ask her out,” he says, sounding dazed. Plainly the logical response is to inquire of Cardozo exactly when was the last time (a) he asked out a girl on the street, and (b) she said yes, and (c) he and she went on to greater things; and in this way bring home to him that he’s being a dummy. I say no such thing, however. We are in the realm not of logic but of wistfulness, and I must maintain that wistfulness is a respectable, serious condition. How, otherwise, to account for much of one’s life?

I’ve copied out the first couple of sentences for the sake of coherence; the nugget of the passage begins with “As to what this point actually was…” And it’s the last line that sticks and sticks.

The last line sticks so well (the second time around, at least) that it impresses me as the key line in all of Netherland: a novel, I now see, of wistfulness. That’s slight-sounding, I know. Surely wistfulness is one of the more disposable states of mind. Or it was, until Joseph O’Neill argued, in the way of literary argument, that much of life simply doesn’t make any sense without an idea of wistfulness, without a sense of its pervasiveness. At first, I thought that the wistfulness was a masculine thing, but that’s just the accident of Cardozo’s sentimental randiness.

Why is wistfulness a “respectable, serious condition”? My sense is that the novel answers the question, but I reserve defense of the proposition for a later date. I suspect that it has something to do with the sheer fecundity of the cornucopia beneath which privileged men and women of the West live, trying to preserve a durable identity from its ceaseless onslaught of novelty, opportunity and possibility — trying to live, in other words, with difficult facts: that they will know most of the people whom they encounter in life, necessarily, for a little while only, and no more; that yesterday’s vital preoccupations have become today’s alien recollections.

We had a bit of fun last night. Multiple bottles of Cabernet sauvignon were consumed, and not just by me, either.

It all began when we went up to listen to Steve Katz, the really gifted guitarist whom we always look forward to hearing, play what the hotel’s daily bulletin called “Flamingo Music.” We thought we’d listen to him for a while before going in to dinner, which we’d booked for 8:30.

Or rather it all began when the singer called Malcolm and the Roy Davis Band, the jazz trio that followed Steve in the lounge, dedicated a song to us, possibly because we were actually paying attention. And what do you suppose the song was? One that I’ve always wanted to hear sung: “Stella By Starlight.” It’s usually an instrumental. Of course, I caught very few of the words. But it was great fun. I was glad that I’d dressed up: in my coat and tie I felt very grown-up. (A pathetic illusion in more ways than one!)

The second fun thing was not being able to remember Dexter Gordon’s name. What prompted this was the trio’s performance of “Willow Weep For Me,” an old song that seems to be very popular down here — everyone but the classical flutist seemed to play it at some point or other. “Willow Weep For Me” happens to be the one song on the Dexter Gordon compilation, “Ballads,” that Kathleen always used to ask me to skip, in pre-Nano days, because it has a (misleading) bump-and-grind introduction.

Anyway, we couldn’t remember Dexter Gordon’s name. All we could remember was the name of another (somewhat greater) saxophonist, Lester Young. “Lester” put “Dexter” entirely beyond the reach of our ageing brains and squarely within senior moment territory. I had to go to the computer in the lobby, which guests are asked to use sparingly, to refresh my memory. Searching the song title at Amazon did the trick very quickly.

The third fun thing was the Tomato Surprise. So to speak. As I wrote the other day, another wedding party has descended upon the Buccaneer, this one quite a bit larger than last week’s. But who was the bride, and who was the groom? The waitstaff didn’t seem to know, and no happy couple stood out as obvious candidates. So, toward the end of dinner, I walked up to an authoritative-looking gentleman, a few years older than I am I think, who was standing alongside the really lengthy table — it must have seated forty — that ran along the inner arcade. I asked him if he could clear up our ignorance and point out the happy pair. This was the moment of the Tomato Surprise, because when he said that he was the groom, I felt as if I’d sat on one.

That explained the size of the party: between them, he and his very attractive and wholly age-appropriate bride could count fourteen grandchildren among the guests. Eh comment! 

We’re staying another day. We’ll on Saturday and go straight to New York. Via San Juan, but without leaving the airport. Kathleen is in heaven. I ought to have suggested this sooner: we got the last two seats on the plane.

And I wrote all the postcards that I’m going to write.

Just so you know what paradise looks like.

This is our last full day here. Tomorrow evening, we fly to San Juan. (That’s the current plan, anyway; our vacation endgames are notoriously open to rearrangement.) There, we will spend the night in one of the big hotels in Isla Verde, on the Atlantic, only minutes from the airport. On Saturday, we’ll return to New York. (That’s the plan, anyway.)  

It has been a very simple vacation — or so I think of it. It has been simple for us. A battalion of housemaids, gardeners, cooks and servers has made simplicity possible. We’ve had to do little more than show up for meals. Kathleen has alternated needlework with a rather comprehensive history of the West Indies (full of treaties and other diplomatic complications). I have read several books and re-read two others (taking notes in the latter case). If I haven’t spent as much time studying Nederlands as I might have done, I’ve been very thorough about my lessons. We have walked most days, either along Beauregard Beach or out on the headlands. In the early days, we watched a few DVDs, but for the most part we have spent evenings quietly and gone to sleep early.

Kathleen never made it into Christiansted, and I haven’t written any postcards.

In our room above the beach, the pounding of the surf has been audible at all times, even with the door shut and over the air-conditioning’s low groan. I’ve spent a positively boyish amount of time watching the waves wash grains of sand and small rocks back and forth across the strand, trying to grasp the millennia during which all this beauty transpired without anybody to see it. Then I think of how long it took human beings to see the beauty in it.

And I’ve thought of all the messages that I have tucked in bottles, just like the one that you are reading, even before the InterSea was discovered! I think of all of everyone’s messages, bobbing about out there — and of the many more that have sunk forever to the bottom, as unlikely to be retrieved as if they’d fallen into the Mindanao Trench. Is it not amazing that any are ever read!

Very grand accommodations: not ours!

The terrorist attacks on Americans and Britons in Mumbai have made it hard for me to work up even a modicum of Thanksgiving spirit. Sorry — I forgot to mention that I’d been reading about all the passengers stuck at Suvarnabhumi Airport in Bangkok — among them the mother of a friend. The two incidents are utterly different in one respect: the Thai protests have little or no international dimension. And yet perhaps for that very reason they trouble me more. I’ve been watching Thai democracy founder for a few months now, and what bothers me the most is that I’m on the protestors’ side: my instincts, too, are to disenfranchise uneducated, semi-feudalized rural voters. I’ve wanted to disenfranchise rural American voters ever since I lived in Texas, in the 1970s.

I say “wanted.” I didn’t say that I thought it would be a good idea. Clearly it would be best to bring rural Thai voters into some kind of cultural synch with their educated urban countrymen. But what if they don’t want that? What if, like so many Americans, they’d rather reality television?

My democratic impulses, obviously, are a lot more head than heart at the moment. So it’s a good thing that the most problematic of American holidays (in my book) will find me at a table for two with Kathleen, far from home, eating anything on the menu that isn’t a turkey dinner.

John Smith received a parrot as an early Christmas gift. The parrot had a bad attitude and an even worse vocabulary. Every word out of the bird’s mouth was rude, obnoxious and laced with profanity.

John tried and tried to change the bird’s attitude by consistently saying only polite words, playing soft music and anything else he could think of to ‘clean up’ the bird’s vocabulary. Finally, John was fed up and he yelled at the parrot. The parrot yelled back.

John shook the parrot and the parrot got angrier and even ruder. John, in desperation, threw up his hands, grabbed the bird and shoved him in the freezer.

For a few minutes the parrot squawked and kicked and screamed. Then suddenly there was total quiet. Not a peep was heard for over a minute.

Fearing that he’d hurt the parrot, John quickly opened the door to the freezer.

The parrot calmly stepped out onto John’s outstretched arms and said “I believe I may have offended you with my rude language and actions. I’m sincerely remorseful for my inappropriate transgressions and I fully intend to do everything I can to correct my rude and unforgivable behavior.”

John was stunned at the change in the bird’s attitude. As he was about to ask the parrot what had made such a dramatic change in his behavior, the bird continued …. “May I inquire as to what the turkey did?” (Thanks, Fossil Darling)

Last night, at dinner, Kathleen asked me why I looked so sad; and when we walked back to our room on the beach, I knew for the umpteenth time how lucky I was and am to have found her.

The night before, I had selected Red Dust from the wallet of DVDs that I’d brought along for our viewing pleasure. Kathleen hadn’t seen this movie, about a Truth and Reconciliation proceeding in South Africa, starring Chiwetel Ejiofor and Hilary Swank. I had completely forgotten the brief flashes of gruesomeness that punctuate the film whenever Alex Mpondo (Mr Ejiofor), currently an MP, is obliged to remember his persecution under the apartheid regime. Kathleen found the movie excellent but was troubled by the blood. It woke her in the middle of the night, and she had trouble getting back to sleep.

If reports of bad dreams and sad faces sound contrary to the spirit of vacation in Paradise, don’t be daft. This is what our vacations are for: slowing down to a point that allows unpleasant things to be registered and dealt with. Unlike all previous vacations that I can think of, this one is lasting long enough, and quietly enough, for us to break past the running-away phase with which all vacations begin: we can’t believe that we’ve escaped! Now we’re beginning to think of going back, not in the do-we-have-sense (although there’s certainly that), but in the more constructive frame of asking how regular life might be made more like this.

Walking downhill after breakfast, Kathleen wondered if people who grow up in St Croix realize how beautiful it is. I answered that no reasonably healthy young person can live on beauty alone. That’s for folks our age, at least the ones who have amassed plenty of interesting stuff.

Over the weekend, I re-read Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland. One of the great books of the year (at the very least), Netherland was too big and beautiful a fish to catch with only one reading, and for months I despaired of finding the time to sit down quietly and read it again. Then I remembered: St Croix at Thanksgiving! And in the event the confluence of heavenly weather and even more heavenly prose has been a pleasure the likes of which I haven’t had since I re-read Emma, for the sixth time, in Maine, in 1996.

What follows is a sketch of the opening paragraphs of the Portico page to come. If you haven’t read Netherland already, don’t wait to run out and get a copy!

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In the late afternoon, Kathleen and I took a walk round one end of the golf course, the part that sticks out into the sea. The wind was relentless, a steady blast from the northeast. The shadowed grounds were  a matte green, almost a colorless grey. The leaves on trees already permanently slanted by the wind shrieked and frizzled like pennants announcing the grand opening of a hurricane. But it was just a windy day.

It was odd to be out in such conditions without being soaking wet; for there wasn’t a drop of rain.

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We have reached that delicious sweet spot of complete relaxation. We are no longer looking around to see what has changed since last year. We aren’t paying attention to the other guests — or not so much, anyway. Why, we don’t even know where yesterday’s wedding reception took place. We didn’t ask and we didn’t see.

Ordinarily, that sweet spot is soured somewhat by the knowledge that we will be leaving in a day or so. Not this year! The halfway point in our visit will come at midnight. Now, that is bliss.

The Mermaid, a beachfront café where we usually eat lunch, will be serving dinner this evening, and we’ve got a 7:30 reservation (the last seating!). I will presumably have something different for dinner, instead of the steak sandwich that I’ve ordered, four nights running, in the bar up at the main house. That’s about all the variety that I can handle.

Our vacation has been clouded by two technical glitches that a bit of preliminary checking would have avoided. It took forever to realize that the extra cell-phone charger that Kathleen picked up a while back, identical twin to the one that we use every day at home, doesn’t work. We (I) thought it was everything else. Much tohu-bohu on that score. And I neglected to load the software for Kathleen’s Digital EOS Rebel on to any of the three (!) laptops that we have with us. It’s true that she has not used the camera since our trip here last year. I know that there’s a trick to making the camera act as an external drive, but I can’t remember what it is. Last year, I was using a smaller Canon camera myself. Oh, well. We’re managing.

Oh, yes: we’re managing all right.

Here is a very discreet shot of the marriage that was just celebrated a few dozen yards from our terrace. The bride and her father made as they approached the waterfront structure — a sort of topless huppa — where the groom and the scarlet-robed celebrant awaited them.

The bride’s veil drifted over the sand just as dreamily as you might think it would.

I’ve made it a point, this vacation, to get up early in the morning and head to breakfast. It’s very simple: I want to be tired when it’s time to go to bed, without having had a lot of wine to drink. So I’ve been getting up before seven, or shortly thereafter, and climbing the hill in hopes of snagging a table with a view like the one above, which I enjoyed for several hours this morning. On my way out of the room, Kathleen promised to join me, “in a while.” It’s true that, when I finally called the room to see how she was doing, she answered immediately and was obviously awake. She crested the hill about fifteen minutes later.

Between finishing my own breakfast and Kathleen’s arrival, I finished reading Diane Johnson’s Lulu in Marrakech, a novel as important as any that she has written and particularly important reading right now, when Americans are thinking about getting their groove back in the world. It’s largely about the waste of American intelligence — particularly the intelligence of women. I didn’t have much left to read; I’d had to put the novel down in the middle of the 42nd chapter — out of 45 — shortly after eleven last night. (See? My plan is working.) Then I got out my notebook.

I do not plan to write up Lulu while on vacation, but I do intend to take notes that are good enough to allow me to write it up later without feeling that I have to reread it. This is something that I ought to have gotten into the habit of doing a long time ago. In the summer of 2007, I read about ten books without either taking notes or writing them up promptly, and now they’re as good as unread. (I’m particularly distressed about Vikram Chandra’s amazing Sacred Games — which I wouldn’t mind re-reading if re-reading weren’t so very, very expensive in terms of time.) This summer, four books slipped by, two of them novels of the first rank: Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland and Rachel Kushner’s Telex From Cuba. In fairness, it wasn’t just poor note-taking skills that held me back. The power of both novels seemed to derive from something concealed beneath their smoothly engaging surfaces. Both were exciting, but the excitement struck me as a kind of sleight-of-hand. I brought both with me to St Croix, and I hope to start re-reading them tomorrow or Monday. In addition to taking notes as I read, I’ll try hard to summarize my immediate impressions right afterward.

Yes, it’s obviously the thing to do, and I point out my not having done it as a sort of incidental indictment: there are things that I don’t do very well, usually for the reason that, until I began keeping Portico, I didn’t need to do them at all. Oh, I ought to have mastered these skills when I was in school, but — school! As I’ve aged, I’ve grown less thick-headed. When I was young, I could not learn a thing that I wasn’t ready to learn: a vicious circle if there ever was one. Like the people who say, “What do I need a computer for? I get along perfectly well without one!”

As I say, the waste of American intelligence. It’s got to be something in the water.