I am aware that many of you have posted good wishes and I am very appreciative.

I am doing very well, am up and walking, and expect to be home in the next few days.

RJ

My condition has deteriorated and I now find myself in the hospital for back surgery.  No worries – I am under expert care and will return very soon.

What is it with all these kiddies running around Manhattan – in flip-flops? I don’t see any sand; do you?

USA Today marks its first quarter-century today. Richard Pérez-Peña’s story in the Times hails the upstart newspaper for a recent series of tough stories about underequipped American troops in Iraq, and one must grudgingly concede that its embrace of microarticles and graphics have probably contributed to a (slightly) better-informed electorate, at least among traveling businessmen. But it is also a testament to the degredation of thoughtful leisure in this country. Without a standard – however disregarded in practice - of carefully cultivated critical reflection, a society as big and complicated as ours is bound to wind up in some “inexplicable” messes, such as ill-conceived wars and exploding deficits.

In short, there is still nothing of the long-range frame of mind at USA Today.

If I don’t feel much better today than I did yesterday, that may be because I tackled too many jobs. I made a simple dinner for the two of us last night – spaghetti in Buitoni arrabiata sauce – and breakfast this morning. No big deal, ordinarily. But I’m coming to the tentative conclusion – nothing’s firm until the surgeon goes over my X-rays (the taking of which was a surprising ordeal) – that I ought to do as little as I can. At the same time, I’ve ordered from all the local eateries two times over. A diet of diner food is demoralizing.

As for reading, I’m maxing out. I may have to take a day off from the printed word, and just watch movies. Yesterday, I finished Thomas Mallon’s Fellow Travelers. I was sobbing. Today, I read half of Katheryn Davis’s The Thin Place, a good book but not one that speaks to me as powerfully as the Mallon or as the even more astonishing Sacred Games, by Vikram Chandra. That nine-hundred-page masterpiece kept me busy for over three breathtaken days. I’ve also started in on Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes, in which the CIA is held up as a misconceived and incompetent organization run/ruined by Ivy League cowboys. It is a long way from the quiet piety of The Good Shepherd.

Speaking of movies, I’ve watched a few. Under the Tuscan Sun, the other night with Kathleen – a great fave of mine, and she had seen it only once. The Dreamers, Bernardo Bertolucci’s steamy movie about Soixante-Huit. Then, yesterday, Top Hat. It struck me as the most elegant American picture ever made, and to underscore its remarkable achievement, I watched its immediate predecessor, The Gay Divorcée, this evening. Everything vulgar and heavy about the earlier, much longer movie gets cleaned up in Top Hat, which, among other things, tamps down to the minimum the Busby Berkeley excesses of “The Continental.” Silly Alice Brady (whom I usually adore) is replaced by the delightfully mordant Helen Broderick. And, let’s face it, the clothes are much, much crisper. Top Hat gets everything right.

It did occur to me, though, that a song in praise of puttin’ on white ties and tails couldn’t possibly be sung by someone who had to do it with any regularity. That’s not because tails are uncomfortable, but because white-tie events have a waxworks aspect that is anything but invigorating.

I’d feel a lot better if I could raise my head a centimeter or two, but that’s a matter of morale, not pain. The pain is greatly reduced, and would be lesser still if I would just stay out of the kitchen.

Kathleen goes to Washington tomorrow for a conference, and she won’t be able to accompany me to the surgeon. But I’ll arrange for his secretary and Kathleen’s priceless Mona to set up an appointment, so that he can explain to her what he has told to me. I’ve reached the age where you don’t see a new doctor alone. You’re too anxious (at best) to pay attention to all the details.

Have the best Monday possible!

Convalescence is also the mother of invention, I’ve concluded. It is, after all, a kind of necessity. 

Since I was forbidden by Kathleen to undertake the weekly cleaning of our dustiferous apartment, I settled down with the Book Review. The idea of reading it, however, with no prospect of sitting at the desk in the blue room to write up my weekly feature, was too bleak. I resolved to get out the new laptop, which I haven’t used very much and which is therefore unfamiliar, and to write a note or two about each review as I went along, in the form of an email, which I would then send to the desktop for formatting. And that’s how I spent the mid-afternoon. It worked! But that’s enough for today.

Thanks to all the readers who have wished me well in comments and emails. I slept very well last night; the Valium seems to be fulfilling its primary function, as a muscle-relaxant. My head is still pushed downward, so that “eye-level” means “floor-level,” but I’m managing. I see a spinal surgeon on Tuesday, to rule out fracture. Fracture seems unlikely, but the possibility has to be looked into. Meanwhile, I’m left with spasming, inflamed neck, shoulder, and upper-arm muscles. If I sit still, the pain is slight to none. When I read, I place the book on a pillow in my lap. Oh, the reading I’ve done.

Happy weekend to all!

The other day, I had a bad fall, with still-undetermined consequences. Doing just about anything besides reading is painful, especially thinking and typing, both operations that this blog takes for granted. I will try to provide daily updates, but, for the time being, regular features are suspended.

As if the people of Iraq weren’t already suffering enough, they now face a country-wide epidemic of that old-fashioned but by no means extinct horror, cholera.

It occurs to me that I’ve never said anything about three movies that I saw last month, in at least one case on the same day as a movie that I did write up. They were: No Reservations, The Bourne Ultimatum, and The Nanny Diaries. These were all films that I wanted to see – and so did Kathleen, so she clawed out the time to go. I remember that, after The Bourne Ultimatum, she suggested that we have lunch at the Lexington Candy Shop. where the menus announced that two films had been shot there: The Day of the Condor, which of course we knew about, and The Nanny Diaries. Intrigued, and wondering why I hadn’t seen anything about The Nanny Diaries, I went straight to the Video Room and made a fool of myself with a short clerk who can’t stand me by asking for the DVD. The movie hadn’t even come out.

Of the three, The Nanny Diaries most deserved a write-up, if only because it seemed so wildly misjudged by the critics, who didn’t think that Scarlett Johansson was right for the part. Neither Kathleen nor I could understand that; she seemed perfect. And she was a natural foil for Laura Linney, who can do repression so well that you feel sorry for her proper women who believe that it is vital to play by the rules. Ms Johansson’s nanny was adorably flaky, not about her job but about her future. And the kid, played by Nicholas Reese Art, was adorable, too. Kids usually aren’t. Not to me. (See below.)

What’s there to say about a movie like The Bourne Ultimatum? “Wow”? “It’s great fun”? “The acting is super”? All three statements are true. Say another word, though, and you spoil the fun for someone else.

No Reservations will be, I hope, Adam Eckhart’s breakout role. Of course, after all this time, it may be that Mr Eckhart is never going to have a breakout role. But in this film, he’s the nice guy to Catherine Zeta-Jones’s heavy. For once, there isn’t a thing that you can say against the character he plays. Mr Eckhart’s repertoire of bastards, some likeable, some detestable, appears to have kept audiences at a distance. There’s no other explanation for the fact that this great actor is not a superstar, George Clooney’s cutup cousin. No Reservations is a charming romantic comedy with dampened screwball elements – Ms Zeta-Jones, lovely as ever and here quite convincing as a thoughtful, driven chef, is simply not built for the speed of screwball. Every time they had a scene together, Mr Eckhart made Abigail Breslin a lot easier to put up with.

Andrew O’Hagan has taken the unseemly involvement of Catholic priests with teenage boys and completely rearranged its contours – and produced a dryly lovely novel in the process. (I should love to know what Colm Tóobín thinks of this novel.)

I’d like to say something like this: “Ordinarily, I write up books during August without posting about them at The Daily Blague,” but that would be nonsense, because I haven’t been blogging long enough for anything to become “ordinary.” This year, of course, I spent the month preoccupied by reapplying the old look and feel (which I rather like) to a new blog. I read a great deal but I didn’t write very much, and now I have a stack of books on my desk and a handful of dimming recollections. I do hate that. I like putting a book down and writing about it straightaway.

¶ Be Near Me.

PS: I fixed the link to my write-up of The Nines, in case you were interested but met with a 404. I apologize for the inconvenience, but I hope that some readers are learning to find things at Portico on their own.

When we had a house on Candlewood Lake, we would steal down to the farmstand one morning in August and buy as many as fourteen dozen ears of corn. Back at home, we would spend the day shucking, parboiling, weighing and bagging the corn. We had a deep-freezer, you see. So we could enjoy fresh corn all winter long. My hands-down favorite way of cooking it was to sauté it. I later found that this method works wonders with the much less flavorful corn that we get in town (all the year round). That’s undoubtedly why Melissa Clark’s recipe for Roasted Fish Fillets With Brown Butter Corn Sauce caught my eye in Wednesday’s Times. Here’s my slightly different version:

¶ Salmon in Kernel Sauce.

What I wanted to see this morning was Romance and Cigarettes, the star-studded movie by John Tuturro. But it wasn’t showing at the Film Forum until one o’clock in the afternoon. I can’t wait until one o’clock to go to the movies, especially as I prefer to have lunch afterward. Fierce People was tempting, but not tempting enough to override the siren call of a train ride to the Lower East Side, where The Nines was showing at the Sunshine. Actually, I was up for the thrill of finding out whether Ryan Reynolds, an actor completely unknown to me, could carry a movie that many critics have spoken of as an updated Twilight Zone. (Which it’s not.) He can.

Afterward, I went over to my favorite downtown bistro, where, aside from the manager, everyone was new and confusion seemed to be the order of the day. It wasn’t until my second martini that I thought to ask after the croque monsieur that, ordinarily, would have made its appearance. The waiter, it turned out, hadn’t grasped that part of my order, probably because he was transfixed by the effort to get the martini specifications right. I miss the days when there was only one kind of martini: the kind I like.

On the way home, I drifted dangerously near to McNally Robinson, but I steered clear. No new books today, no sir.

¶ The Nines.

D’you know, I just had the most surprising idea. If you believe in reincarnation, why not backwards reincarnation. Something that might explain how Leona Helmsley, who died last month, has already been reincarnated as the new Queen of Mean, Judi Giuliani. Oops, I’m supposed to call her “Judi,” although that’s how she was called until stricken with delusions of grandeur. Now she is “Judith.” Go for it, I say: what could be classier that “Giuditta Giuliani”?

¶ Judy Bachrach on Judi G, in Vanity Fair.

A few weeks ago, music critic Tim Page published an essay in The New Yorker, “Parallel Play,” in which he described the suffering that he endured as a childhood victim of Asperger’s Syndrome – suffering that might have been alleviated had he known that he was afflicted with it. (He was not diagnosed until a few years ago, at the age of fifty.) Much of his misery seemed very familiar to me.

We are informally referred to as “Aspies,” and if we are not very, very good at something we tend to do it very poorly. Little in life comes naturally – except for our random, inexplicable, and often uncontrollable gifts – and, even more than most children, we assemble our personalities unevenly, piece by piece, almost robotically, from models we admire.

Very familiar. I talked about this article with my therapist. He had read it, too. At the end of the hour, I asked him to tell me if it had made him think of me. He said that it had.

So, a mild case, perhaps. As Mr Page implies, you can “learn” your way out of Asperger’s. It never goes away, but you learn how other people are likely to expect you to behave. That may be why I have such great faith in learning; knowing how much good it can do has enabled me to take an interest in things that were not at first appealing – most notably, politics. But the disorder, to the extent that I suffer from it, generates a kind of hyperconsciousness that can be exhausting. (I know that I drink martinis in order to shut it down for the night.) The dread of being exposed as an emotional fake never vanishes altogether. My feelings may be genuine, but they’re tainted by the fact that I learned to have them. I daresay that that statement makes no sense to some people: how can you learn how to feel? I must be mistaken – or so they might argue, at least in my imagination. I hope that the matter won’t come up.

It’s probably typical of my touch of Asperger’s, though, that I find it so interesting that I’m (inappropriately) telling the world.

Putting off the aforementioned clerical work, I thought I’d compile a show-off list of operas of which I have more than three recordings. The figures in parenthesis represent independent DVDs productions.

Mozart

   Le Nozze di Figaro – 5 (2)

   Don Giovanni – 5 (1)

   Così fan tutte – 11 (1)

Wagner

   Tannhaüser – 3

   Lohengrin – 5 (1)

   Tristan und Isolde – 4 (1)

   Parsifal – 3 (1)

Verdi

   Un ballo in maschera – 5

   Don Carlo – 5 (1)

   Aida – 5 (1)

   Otello – 5 (1)

Strauss:

   Der Rosenkavalier – 4 (2)

   Ariadne auf Naxos – 3

   Die Frau ohne Schatten – 3

   Capriccio – 3.

Puccini

   Turandot – 3 (2)

I’m shocked that Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg doesn’t make this list. (I did give a recording away.) I’m totally not surprised that I have oodles more of Così than anything else.

I love each of these operas. There’s only one less-than-canonical work (Capriccio). I couldn’t possibly be more bourgeois. 

There’s a big pile of books to be written up, but I’ve decided to take the rest of the afternoon “half off,” and do clerical stuff that allows me to have a little music going in the background. The little music that I’ve chosen is the once-singleton recording of Der Rosenkavalier made by Herbert von Karajan in the late Fifties – the recording that the production’s Marschallin, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, devoted her last years to reissuing in monaural sound. I’ve never heard that version, and I don’t want to.

The birds are twittering…

The last thing I want to do is disappoint my conservative detractors by failing to cluck over the demise of Jeffrey Carter Albrecht, the Texas rock keyboardist who was shot in the head the other day when he banged on a neighbor’s door. Actually, it was his girlfriend’s neighbor. Mr Albrecht had “assaulted” her, according to the Times, and she had locked him out of her house. It was actually late at night, not during the day. I suspect that alcohol was involved. Why else would Mr Albrecht have beaten on a stranger’s back door?

The decedent’s mother, Judith, said of the shooter – who was acting within his rights under Texas law – that she thought “he could have made another choice.” Another choice? But that’s Texas for you. Ladies, even moms, are too polite to say “a better choice.”

Had I been defending my castle against unknown door-pounders, I’d have issued a preliminary warning. Something about stepping back or I’ll be shooting. Perhaps that’s what the shooter thought he was doing when he aimed high. How could he know that Mr Albrecht was six-five?

You can be sure that the good old boys of Texas are still laughing about this one.

Having finished Rites of Peace, I’ve lurched back into fiction, and am well into both Sacred Games, by Vikram Seth, and Chang & Eng, by Darin Strauss. But I’m still working on David Gilmour’s informative but entertaining look at the Raj, The Ruling Caste. Every now and then, I look into Aline S Taylor’s Isabel of Burgundy: The Duchess Who Played Politics in the Age of Joan of Arc 1397-1471. I can’t help comparing it with Helen Maurer’s Margaret of Anjou, a completely different kind of history book.

Stalled Books: The Raw Shark Texts; There Goes My Everything; The Label.

I did read, practically in one sitting, Clotaire Rapaille’s The Culture Code: An Ingenious Way to Understand Why People Around the World Live and Buy As They Do.

As for the Book Review:

¶ The Revelator.

There’s a sad story in today’s Metro section, about New Jersey brothers who aren’t speaking to each other because they disagree about illegal immigration. Bryan Lonegan has long been an attorney representing people with immigration problems. His brother, Steve, has long been a very conservative businessman and politician. The brothers could deal with that. But when Steve, currently the mayor of Bogota, NJ, hopped on the anti-illegal immigration bandwagon – an issue that Bryan finds opportunistic at best – his brother objected.

Before, his conservatism was his business. Now he’s on my turf.

Shades of Antigone.

Don’t look at me. I’ve only just launched the new, improved version of my own fabled  blog, and at a time of life when a project such as that turns fifteen days into one glutinous mass. Suddenly, voilà, the month is over, and the prize or piece of candy that one is going to be stuck with drops out of the chute.

Not that I’m complaining about the result! But I owe beacoup de courrieux. (Especially to Ellen and Gawain.)

I spent yesterday reading. First, there was a weekend’s worth of Timeses. As the British used to say, Friday to Monday. A lot of print. The rest of the day went to India – I’ll tell you more on Wednesday – until the late evening, when I jumped into Darin Strauss’s Chang & Eng. What a treat!

Kathleen didn’t know about Chang and Eng. Her innocence never ceases to confound me.