A pattern seems to be developing. I begin the Morning Read with Moby-Dick. Then I put Melville down and pick up Cervantes, looking forward to the breath of sanity. Read the rest of this entry »

Since writing about Joseph O’Neill’s first novel, I’ve had a chance to discuss it with the author (this is the life!), and nothing that he told me in our brief exchange prompted me to alter my remarks.

Mr O’Neill did agree with me that the dust jacket, designed by Chip Kidd way back when, when only designers knew who Chip Kidd was, and the author photograph by Nigel Parry, ditto (mutatis mutandis), is probably rather valuable.

You should have seen Kathleen’s face when, fifteen seconds after I said it, the guy the with musical zipper announced, “It’s Mozart!”

Rapping the opening bars of Eine kleine Nachtmusik convinced her.

I guess I had to have been there.

On Friday afternoon, as I was hunkered down in the kitchen preparing not one but two dinners — Megan and Ryan would be coming that evening; an old friend of Kathleen’s on Saturday — I had to admit that it had been too long since my last serious dinner. For one thing, I had no idea where the gelatine was, and without gelatine I could not make the raspberry charlotte that appeared on the cover of Saveur several years ago. looking utterly luscious. (I’d made it twice before). So I had to go downstairs to buy some, and it was on this errand that I re-thought my plans. I would prepare that night’s menu the next night, and make something simple instead. In addition to the gelatine, I bought chicken, new potatoes, and corn. In the fridge at home, I had a rib steak and a sugar baby (a spherical, seedless watermelon). I was set.

In keeping with this ruder fare, I laid the table on the balcony, not the one in the living room. The weather was perfect! Megan and Ryan arrived about fifteen minutes early, before I’d had a chance to change clothes but after I’d cleaned up after a major screw-up. Into a four-cup measure, I poured the milk for a cornbread recipe, broke in the eggs, and then attempted to beat these ingredients with an electric eggbeater. The measuruing cup was nowhere near large enough to contain the instant surge. Milk and egg flew all over the counter and dripped down the front of the dishwasher into a puddle.

As I say, I’d put this disaster behind me by the time the newlyweds walked in. Not only had I cleaned it up and put the cornbread batter into the oven, but I’d stopped screaming at myself. It was as though I were yelling at someone else. “I can’t believe what an idiot you are!” — expletive-laden variations on that tune. “Even a five year-old would have known better!” It really did make me feel better, if only by occupying my mind while my hands bent to the drudgery of wiping up one of the two things that you don’t want to drop on a kitchen floor, eggs and oil.

By five o’clock on Saturday afternoon, I’d tidied the apartment as usual, and also whipped up some beet borscht for dinner. I’d begun to set the table. And I’d started to feel very sorry for myself. All I wanted to do was to curl up with Dostoevsky’s Demons. Kathleen suggested that we make a reservation at a local restaurant, but I was too conscious of the expensive tenderloin that I already hadn’t done anything with the night before. So I pushed on grimly. Once I’d finished setting the table, I felt much better. I saw that there was nothing to do but sauté the beef and wait for the sauce — a combination of wine, stock and cream — to boil down, so that I could stir in some Roquefort cheese.

This morning, I woke up resolved to have breakfast at the coffee shop across the street, but I changed my mind an hour or so later, when I divined that Kathleen really needed to stay in bed. After two rather vinous evenings, my head was far from clear, but perhaps that was for the best. I may have forgotten where the gelatine was, but my hands knew how to load the dishwasher, make coffee, and sizzle some sausages. (I was even up to squeezing a bagful of oranges.)

If I weren’t so tired — as it happens, I’m overdue for a B-12 shot (my gut doesn’t absorb this essential vitamin) — I’d be in the kitchen now, consolidating the weekend’s experiences, or at least cleaning the refrigerator. I am still looking for what I call my blogger’s kitchen — an ideal place that holds nothing but what’s needed to make the next meal. If you know a sorcerer who can arrange such a marvel, please let me know.

Woody Allen reigns in Spain. The poster is another example of egregious Hollywood “billing.” The actress playing Vicky (the first name in the title, after all) has at least as big a part as Scarlett Johansson’s, but Rebecca Hall has yet to make herself known to anything like the same extent.

Morning

¶ Bar Code: In typical Times fashion, John Schwartz’s story doesn’t spell out what two graduates of a private school here actually did in connection with their “freelance science project” to expose the mislabeling of fish in New York markets and restaurants — beyond shopping, dining, and marinating morsels of fish in alcohol — but Harriets the Spy everywhere are in for a technology upgrade.

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Morning

¶ $2848: That’s how much Mrs Aaron Spelling, of Holmby Hills, California, plans to pay for a spacious pair of penthouses atop the The Century, a new Los Angeles condominium that comes equipped with, among other amenities, Israeli-trained security.

Noon

¶ Deconstruction: Wait! Don’t throw that old steam iron away! Take it apart first, and see what’s inside. (Thanks, kottke.org)

Night

¶ High Ghoul: “Create an authentic Celtic graveyard to die for!”

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Morning

¶ Settlement: The $2.7 million payout with which New York City settled lawsuits brought by fifty-two individuals who were arrested, allegedly without reason, during a 2003 protest against our Iraqi misadventure reminds us that the much bigger group of cases generated by similarly groundless police conduct during the 2004 Republican Convention must not be settled.

Noon

¶ Surprise: Imagine that! The Chinese Ministry of Culture has reneged on a promise to help out the Asia Society with a massive show of Chinese revolutionary art, up to and including the Cultural Revolution. I’m breathtook!

Night

¶ Wheeze: The Mayor sure knows how to get a conversation going. Topping the city’s bridges and skyscrapers with windmills is a very bad idea. Wasn’t the PanAm Building helipad closed for a reason? Read the rest of this entry »

¶ In Moby-Dick, a long evening at the Spouter Inn, culminating in one of the most peculiar meetings in literature: pretending to be asleep, Ishmael watches Queequeg disrobe and, in the process, reveal his startling tattoos. Something of a noble savage, Queequeg is quick to purge his space of the interloping Ishmael, but quick, too, to stand down when pacified by the landlord. Read the rest of this entry »

A memorable issue. Only one Maybe, but lots of Noes.

Morning

¶ Mind the Gap: Five years ago today, Sergio Vieira de Mello, along with twenty-one other people, was killed in a Baghdad bombing that targeted his United Nations mission. Samantha Power considers the consequences.

Noon

¶ Entwistle: Do you remember the Entwistle case? (Brit murders American wife and child in Massachusetts, then flies to Nottinghamshire, where he settles in with his parents.) No, I don’t either. But Jonathan Raban makes it digitally interesting (as distinct from ghoulishly interesting), at the London Review of Books.

Night

¶ Nearby: Young upwardly-mobile Asian-Americans are not awayly-mobile. They’re cutting out the historic suburban stage; their bright new places are nearby their parents’ dumps.

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Armed with GooToDo.com, I have been tidying up many neglected corners of my life. None of them has embarrassed me as much as a small heap of programs, from six of last season’s concerts that I never got round to writing up. As I quite often can’t remember what I did two days ago, it’s no surprise that my musical recollections of these evenings were severely motheaten by the time I could no longer put off laying them to rest. There was nothing for it but to take the opportunity to poke fun at myself. That’s what, after all — when all else fails — I’m here for.

¶ In Moby-Dick, it is a “matter of concernment” for Ishmael to find cheap lodgings in New Bedford. The simple thing would be to sign on with a whaler from that port, but Ishmael prefers significance to simplicity, and is determined to wait for the Nantucket packet so that he can sail from “the Tyre of this Carthage.”

Excuse me, but is this the fabled New World? Or did I miss a stop? Chapter 2 is so loaded with classical and Biblical allusions — not to mention a bogus “black letter” writer of whose work Ishmael claims to have the only copy (a ridiculous pretension in the Gutenberg Age) — that Ishmael seems almost as demented by his reading as Don Quixote. Read the rest of this entry »

Morning

¶ Health Warning: From the Houston Chronicle: “PETA wants to advertise vegan message on border fence.” And here Mexicans were thinking that what’s distinctive about their diet was hunger.

Afternoon

¶ Alphabet: Luc Sante writes so beautifully about a night in long-ago New York that it’s hard to believe that I might not have been there. Or that it might not have happened — not quite like that, anyway.

Night

¶ OddTodd: Don’t miss OddTodd, proof that gifted people can be counted on to work their butts off for nothing. Todd claims to be unemployed; in fact, he’s just not drawing a salary. (You can help with that!)

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Today, we resume the Morning Read in a fashion appropriate to the season: late. We confess, in fact, that we almost forgot all about it. We were nagged by the question that there was something that we were supposed to remember, but it was not until we glanced at the by now hypnotically familiar pile of books on the footstool that we remembered. Ah! Don Quixote. Moby-Dick.

Having avoided reading both of these books for so many years — not just gotten out of having to read them but actually kept them at a distance — I’m not surprised by the appeal of tackling them both together. Salt and pepper, what? Read the rest of this entry »

What happens when you mix the stodgy, speculative popular-academic history of some hitherto dark corner of pop culture and its antecedents, on the one hand, and the prosy excitements of the old-fashioned dime novel on the other? The James Boys, that’s what. You knew that William and Henry were the older brothers of Jesse and Frank, right?

Like a lot of Upper East Siders who are members of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I feel lucky to have such an amazing art collection at my doorstep. Every once in a while, though, it hits me, with a palooka punch, that I have an amazing art collection at my doorstep, one that I can walk into as often as I want to, at no additional charge; one that I’m familiar enough with that I can navigate through it without getting lost or wondering where the things that I like to look at are kept.

It isn’t Schadenfreude, exactly, but when I think that most visitors have to make the most of their time in the Museum, be it an entire day, before heading back to wherever — “wherever” being considerably farther away than a twenty-minute stroll — I’m humbled and elated at the same time. I’ve been told that I’m privileged since I was old enough to understand English, and exhorted to act worthily. But it becomes harder and harder to imagine going to the Museum as a duty.

I went on Friday morning, not because I was burning to see anything but because I had a bunch of errands on Madison Avenue, and because I like the Museum’s cafeteria. (I like all of the Museum’s eateries, but I especially appreciate the cafeteria, because it realizes the Platonic Idea of what we all had to put up with in school; as in heaven, the unpleasant bits have been swept away. The burgers and fries are tasty, not greasy, but still disreputable enough to relish.) I did have a few Museum-specific objectives. The Times had run a quiz of sorts, that morning, featuring animals in blown-up detail from various things in the Museum, and I wanted to see if I could find the greyhound — which I did, but not in the Robert Lehman collection, where I looked first, but in the Old Master galleries: St Dominic raising somebody from the dead, by Bartolomeo degli Erri. And then there was the question of the Rembrandtine mustache. A friend had written of seeing a man dressed in black who sported a “Rembrandtine mustache.” What might that be, I wondered. The answer was more elusive than degli Erri’s greyhound. The only mustache that looked “Rembrandtine” belonged to a face by Frans Hals.

I went to the Museum again this morning. This time, it was to make sure that Kathleen saw the three interesting shows currently on exhibit: Turner, pietre dure, and the great photography show, “Framing A Century.” The last was a big hit. Pietre dure didn’t do anything for Kathleen; although impressed by the technique of hardstone mosaic, she was not moved by any of the pieces. (But she did think that the lithothèque was cool [it truly is], and she liked the shells console.) She wasn’t in the mood for Turner, either. But she loved the photographs. She couldn’t get over how good the older prints look, even after a hundred and fifty years, and the rich intonation of their details. Looking at the photographs through Kathleen’s eyes, I couldn’t get over how good the prints look, either. And I noticed, for the first time, that Roger Fenton’s Roslin Chapel, South Porch (1856) — a picture I can’t get enough of — is not a small print.

Then we came home. We had had breakfast right before, and I made BLTs for lunch shortly after we got back. Kathleen smiled with the delight of feeling “virtuous: it’s early afternoon still and I’ve already done something important.”

If she could only go as often as I do, it wouldn’t seem so important. It might begin to feel as though we were living in a very large apartment.

With a muted thunderclap, Walter Kirn’s review (in today’s issue of The New York Times Book Review) of James Wood’s new book (How Fiction Works) announces the terms of engagement between two literary camps that, until recently, have not had to recognize one another in public. So far, they’ve been able to get away with snubbing — ignoring — one another. Only recently have they taken to showing up at the same parties, or at least on the same coffee tables.

Surely no two of this country’s periodicals have shared a readership for longer than The New Yorker and the Book Review; but until this decade their differences were blurry, kept politely out of focus. Now, perhaps goaded by the frightening challenges that big-time media face in the age of the Blogosphere, the parties are slipping off their gloves. Mr Kirn’s piece crystallizes a long-settling distinction: where The New Yorker (Mr Wood’s outlet) argues for coherence, the Book Review (and, arguably, the newspaper behind it) plumps for fashion. That these alliances — the glossy, Condé-Nast-owned magazine’s with the long view and the long-lasting; the only-lately Painted Lady’s with what Mr Kirn so wonderfully calls “a mess, a mystery or a miracle” — are exactly the opposite of what might have been expected adds exactly the Jovial note that was wanted. Read the rest of this entry »