It’s the middle of the afternoon, and I’ve just put down The Circle, which I’m about halfway through. It’s almost unbearable reading, even though the violence and horror are (so far) altogether implicit, offstage, internalized — easy to overlook. That’s what the heroine, Mae Holland, does. Or perhaps what she is does is to translate: to translate advertising into shared information, touting into gracious recommendation. She does not follow the money. She is actually too busy to care about money. But she steadily transforms herself into a bot that makes money for her employer, the eponymous company.

The writing is suitably creepy. Dave Eggers has does not satirize the perversity of business-speak, as Helen DeWitt does so brilliantly in Lightning Rods, but then The Circle is never, not for a minute, funny — whereas Lightning Rods was gruesomely hilarious. Rather, he captures the ingenuous response of a credulous ingénue. The novel’s tone of voice naive, reflecting Mae’s youthful optimism about technological efficiency. (Hers is the kind of “knowing” naiveté that Mark Edmundson finds so dismaying in Why Teach?) From the very beginning, however, the narrative is decked with red flags, some smaller than others but all cumulatively glaring. No sooner does Mae arrive at the “campus” of the vast social-media/search-engine monstrosity, which has learned how to conceal its stings and scales from the blandishments of Disneyland, than the old friend who got her the job plays a dubious joke on her, making it clear to the reader that Mae is going to have to work very hard to overcome normal human discomfort in this environment. Since Mae is a striver, she puts in the hours with relish. But she can barely keep up with the ever-widening demands that The Circle makes. And she fails to notice that her highly-placed friend is cracking up under the strain.

It’s the naiveté that’s distressing, not The Circle’s nefariousness. Eggers has projected a world only a few years into the future from our own, and nothing that he describes is difficult to imagine. In fact, one assumes that the basic mechanisms for the transmutation of personal information into corporate gold are already in place; one has gotten used to that. What’s horrible is Mae’s equable response to such company mottoes as “Secrets are Lies.” One is put in mind of the vulnerability of now-extinct Amerindians to European pathogens, circa 1500. Five hundred years later, young people with a natural and inevitable lack of long-term experience, and whose parents cannot have been expected to train them in the hygiene of streaming information, blithely follow the tootling piper of Twigglebook.

At Salon, Michele Filgate — whom it has been my pleasure to meet — writes about being so upset by The Circle that she went off social media for a spell. She soon saw that that’s not the answer.

Now that I’m back on social media, I’m realizing that the answer isn’t necessarily to deprive yourself. It’s better to find a balance and not think of your life as existing in 140 characters or status updates.

I’ve set up a few rules for myself, too. No tweeting while walking. No checking the phone on the subway. No TweetDeck. It’s far better to check Twitter on the actual website instead of having it open and taunting me all day long. The biggest thing I’ve realized is that I can’t have social media open while I’m writing. I don’t want to become like Mae, sacrificing real-life friendships for the allure of the screen. I want to be aware of the world around me. I want to write about that world. I want to feel more alive, even if that means being lonelier in the process. It’s a book that connected me with myself again — just as books have always done, and always will do.

Finding balance is the most difficult of the arts of living; it is so much easier to go overboard in one direction or the other. We are all such quirky beings that we have can offer little concrete advice to others. Michele’s simple rules probably seem to her, in retrospect, to be no-brainers. That’s because it took a novel to wake her up to the need to think about her envelopment in social media. Once it did, she had no trouble establishing clear boundaries. I doubt that she’ll be alone.

***

Yes, but is it art? The Circle, I mean. Will it remain a satisfying read long after the present crisis has resolved itself in salvation or disaster? Frankly, I don’t much care. It’s engrossing and timely and really smart,  not just “knowing.” For me, it’s a work of horror from the first page. For younger readers, it might have a more salutary effect.

While I’m enjoying The Circle, I’m mulling over some very strong words by Jonathan Franzen. They appear at the start of his odd new book, The Kraus Project, a work of indie-rock scholarship. Who is going to read this book? There are three texts: essays by Karl Kraus, a rebarbative writer who worked in the glittering sunset of the Austrian Empire; translations of the essays, on facing pages, by Franzen, and footnoted commentary, running along the bottom of the page and beyond. (Some of the notes are provided by Peter Reitter and Daniel Kehlmann.) It is this commentary, of course, that is the nub of the book: Franzen is using Kraus to show up the sins of contemporary America in different colors.

Vienna in 1910 was, thus, a special case. And yet you could argue that America in 2013 is a similarly special case: another weakened empire telling itself stories of its exceptionalism while it drifts toward apocalypse of some sort, fiscal or epidemiological, climactic-environmental or thermonuclear. Our Far Left may hate religion and think we coddle Israel, our Far Right may hate illegal immigrants and think we coddle black people, and nobody may know how the economy is supposed to work now that our manufacturing jobs have gone overseas, but the actual substance of our daily lives is total electronic distraction. We can’t face the real problems; we spent a trillion dollars not really solving a problem in Iraq that wasn’t really a problem; we can’t even agree agree on how to keep health care costs from devouring the GNP. What we can all agree to do instead is to deliver ourselves to the cool new media and technologies, to Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, and to let them profit at our expense.

You might also argue that The Circle is a dilation of this grim picture.

Last night, I watched a movie that I hadn’t seen since it came out, in 1972. It’s one of George Cukor’s last movies, based on a Graham Greene story: Travels With My Aunt. I haven’t read the Greene, which can’t possibly be as frothy as the adaptation by Jay Presson Allen and Hugh Wheeler — can it? The film has not aged well, particularly because of Tony Hatch’s glitzy score, which contrives to clash hideously with its look and feel. Travels With My Aunt would not be very satisfying to sit through if it did not exist in a world of other movies, to several of which it makes pointed, if unintended reference.

That’s the great thing about movies — and why I consider cinema a branch of literary fiction. I have technology to thank. Technology has made it not only possible but convenient to watch movies on demand at home, which was certainly not the case when I was a boy. In other words, I can choose to dip into a movie exactly as I might do with a novel. I love watching movies with friends — friends who will countenance my outbursts and running commentaries — but I am perfectly happy to experience film as I do print: alone. The charms of sitting among strangers in the dark are lost on me.

Being able to watch movies on demand includes being able to watch them often, and I’ve seen many movies many times. I try not to exaggerate, but I am certain that I have seen My House In Umbria a dozen times — at least. Made for TV but indistinguishable from a feature film, Hugh Whitemore’s adaptation of a story by Trevor Nunn, directed by Richard Loncraine, is an exquisitely restrained romance; more bitter than sweet, given the terrorist act that sets it in motion. I thought of it often, during Travels With My Aunt, because it’s in so many ways the “real” version of the same story. Maggie Smith pretends, in Travels, to be what she really is in Umbria: elderly. And the romp has simmered down; champagne gives way to dry cocktails.

As romps go, Travels With My Aunt is the missing link between Auntie Mame and La Cage aux Folles. You have an exuberant, extravagant lady of a certain age. She goes from being a rich woman who loses her fortune to a classy prostitute to a man in drag. Then you have the ingénu, first a little boy, then a middle-aged bank manager (assistant!), to an extremely correct Catholic family. The movies at either end of this continuum are much better than the one in the middle, but Travels With My Aunt is explicit about themes that are barely tacit in Auntie Mame, while at the same time Maggie Smith’s performance is so over the top that she might be impersonating a female impersonator. The movie looks both ways. You might miss that, or not find it very beguiling, if you could see features like Auntie Mame and La Cage aux Folles only rarely, at festivals in theatres.

***

I’m reading The Tempest with a keen interest in Prospero’s derelictions as Duke of Milan. In I, ii, Prospero, the usurped duke, tells his tale to his daughter, Miranda (and to the audience):

My brother and thy uncle, called Antonio —
I pray thee mark me — that a brother should
Be so perfidious! — he whom next thyself
Of all the world I loved, and to him put
The manage of my state, as at that time
Throughout all the signories it was the first
And Prospero the prime duke, being so reputed
In dignity, for the liberal arts
Without a parallel: those being all my study,
The government I cast upon my brother
And to my state grew stranger, being transported
And rapt in secret studies.

This is the stuff of tragedy. The duke is so illustrious that he allows himself to believe that the tedious governance of his realm can be delegated, whilst he passes the time “rapt in secret studies.” It is impossible to imagine that Shakespeare regarded such conduct as anything but wicked. The Tempest, however, is not a tragedy. The point of the drama must surely be to teach Prospero that he brought his downfall upon himself, and is responsible for Antonion’s encroachments. It has been a while since I’ve read the play — so long, in fact, that I might be said never to have read it.

Who does not love the lines of Ariel’s song to Ferdinand?

Full fathom five they father lies;
  Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
  Nothing of him that doth fade
  But doth suffer a sea change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea nymphs hourly ring his knell.

“Sea change” has entered the language as a phrase of uncertain meaning — suitably uncertain, since the transformation into “something rich and strange” takes place in the dark, too slowly for the unaided eye to notice. As a dramatist, Shakespeare has no time for dawdling processes, so Alonso’s bones have turned into coral mere hours after his death. That justifies the technical misuse of “sea change” to signify a pronounced, and possibly sudden, change of atmosphere. The song is deceptive, of course; Ferdinand’s father, even if he is the wicked king of Naples, does not lie at the bottom of the sea, but is as safe as his son. Since we in the audience know this, we are spared Ferdinand’s melancholy associations. The song is delightful and mysterious, but not ominous.

Here’s something that we couldn’t do when I was little: watch a forty year-old television program. The history of the invention and development of broadcast television is a murky affair involving many small steps, some of them backwards, but the forty-year measure cuts right through that: a show of that age, when I was ten (1958), would have had to be made at the end of World War I. Not on!

But forty years ago from 2013 is no big deal; lots and lots of shows are older than that. Somewhere in my library, I’ve got a collection of old-time Saturday-morning kiddies’ shows, some of which, I’m quite sure, date back to 1953 and beyond — sixty years!

On the not-so-great side of remarkability: many of the actors in the show that I watched yesterday, the BBC adaptation of Dorothy Sayers’s The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club — many of them have died, some, like the star, Ian Carmichael (1920-2010), not too long ago and at great old age. A little memento mori with your TV entertainment!

One of the actors who is still with us is Phyllida Law (1932- ). Law has made a number of pictures in a late career, most of them also featuring one or the other of her daughters, Emma or Sophie Thompson. But I had never seen her in her halcyon days — which is, of course, to say that, when I saw Unpleasantness on Masterpiece Theatre all those decades ago, I didn’t know that the actress playing Marjorie Phelps, a well-born bohemian artist who lives on a houseboat in the Thames, was enjoying her halcyon days, nor that she had a fourteen year-old daughter at home who would grow up to look almost exactly like her. The resemblance I would rate at 95%. Everything about Law is somewhat lighter. Her voice is not so deep, and her manner is slightly but markedly more coquettish. Emma Thompson, of whom I’ve seen a lot over the years, has a weightier, more serious presence. I doubt that she could scamper through an ingénue’s antics as blithely as her mother, the more natural comedian. But I’m quibbling over the 5% that distinguishes the two women. From the standpoint of a film viewer, Emma Thompson is a reincarnation of Phyllida Law, not her daughter. Discovering this in the train of watching The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club is a way of standing reincarnation on its head. Law becomes the preincarnation of Thompson. I am quite sure that I have never seen anything like it.

When Masterpiece Theatre began showing the Peter Wimsey mysteries, I knew of Dorothy Sayers as the Penguin translator of Dante. Indeed, she still is, decades after her death in 1957. The Penguin edition would be my favorite, if only it included the Italian text. That would make it perfect. Sayers’s notes and commentaries are stupendously rich, not at all what you get when a great poet has a go at the classic. The translation, by the same token, is relative weak, suffering from a lack of poetic flow; Sayers manages to sound “medieval,” but not at all like Dante. By why worry about being “like” Dante if you could have Dante himself, right there on the facing page!

(I’ve just discovered that you can buy an MP3 version of a Folkways Recording of the first eight cantos of Inferno, recorded in 1956 by a professor Enrico de Negri. It sounds great, but then, when it comes to Italian, I could listen to anyone with a nice voice read the telephone directory. I have to figure out how to get it onto an iPod.)

I remember that it was surprising that an Oxford don, specializing in Dante, would write murder mysteries on the side. We were so innocent in those days! Not too many lustrums ago, I re-read The Nine Tailors, which is all about churchbells and how they can kill you if you’re tied up in the belfry while changes are rung. Sayers’s mysteries are always satisfying, her crimes engagingly ghastly; but the real draw is the fairy tale that they weave out of the rays of Britain’s sunset. Lord Peter Wimsey, younger brother of the Duke of Denver, a genuine grandee, is, as his name betrays, too good to be true. An amateur sleuth with resources adequate to almost any demand, including an impromptu Atlantic crossing (Clouds of Witness), Peter comes kitted out with a valet, Bunter, who is nothing less than a full-bodied counter-argument to Wodehouse’s Jeeves. Together, the two men served in the ghastly trenches at Paschendaele and elsewhere, but now, ten or so years later, they helplessly and endearingly preserve the assymetrical relationship of master and manservant. This is where Sayers’ imagination seems most fanciful. Between them, Wimsey and Bunter appear to share an esprit de corps that requires Bunter to keep Wimsey looking and feeling band-box fresh at all times. I have a hard time believing in a relationship quite so winningly straightforward. The Wimsey romances are anything but timeless, and that is their great charm. They’re historical novels that happen to have been written in the same time period.

Back in the Seventies, I was hugely taken by the resemblance between Ian Carmichael and my adored uncle John. It was a blunt blow to discover that John and my aunt, Ann, were not keen to see any such thing. Now, of course I can understand why. Peter Wimsey’s effervescence has an undeniably fey quality, and there are moments here and there when his remarks seem fatuous. He is, moreover, an English aristocrat, something that my doggedly Yankee relatives would never approve. I see now that, simply by being reminded of my uncle by the actor, I was betraying the fact that I did not understand my family very well, while at the same time indulging in the wishful dream that their actuality were rather different.

On Sunday, I awoke as my old self, or, rather, my younger self: for the first time in ages, I felt — I didn’t feel anything. I just got up and looked around and saw what there was to do, and I did it. No fuss, no fatigue. By bedtime, the apartment was completely tidy — even the balcony was swept — and the pantry shelves were in order. Yesterday, I made a ragù and reorganized the refrigerator. I last cleaned out the fridge so recently that there was very little to pitch out. The ragù filled the apartment with a fragrance that I can only call divine — sage, rosemary, porcini, garlic and wine floating above fennel sausage and chopped tomatoes. The recipe came from Franny’s, the haut Slope restaurant on Flatbush Avenue near Grand Army Plaza, where the Ms NOLA’s mother-in-law-to-be hosted the rehearsal dinner last Friday. The food was very, very yummy. One of the courses was a polenta with ragù that did nothing less than change my mind about polenta. Ray Soleil, also in attendance, cajoled the server for a recipe, which I printed as soon as he sent it to me. I did not try to make the polenta itself; that, I knew, would require the extra-fine polenta meal from Anson Mills that Franny’s uses, and that melts down to a completely sub-granular creaminess. (I hate grits.) I did place an order online, and I look forward to following the recipe, which calls for microplaning cloves of garlic. The ragù from Franny’s was very like one that I’ve been making with fennel sausage for years and years, only much better, owing to the fresh herbs. I had always thought, wrongly, so wrongly, that the sausage provided enough seasoning by itself.

Kathleen and I were going to go out for dinner this evening, to an Italian restaurant that we’re fond of, Luna Rossa, only not in the hot months. It’s a nice place to meet Kathleen after her periodic board meetings at a proximate academy. I strolled over this afternoon to make a reservation. But some workmen were laying the foundations for a new sidewalk, and the restaurant was closed. I decided to make a chicken salad instead, and I’m on my way to do that.

Today, Ray and I went to the Container Store, and you know perfectly well that nothing of general interest ensued. Suffice it to say that the precious Christmas ornaments (untouched by me) are in a much safer place, the silver tea service is once again accessible, and DVD storage is no longer a headache. Also — and this did not involve products from the Container Store — the operas that are packaged in boxes (as distinct from the ones stuffed into jewel boxes) have been arranged, by composer and by order of composition (roughly) behind the books in a certain low bookshelf. Amazingly, they all just fit. Mozart on top, Strauss and Puccini on the bottom, Wagner and Verdi stacked in the middle, and everybody else strewn about the remaining crannies. It was a very satisfactory afternoon of work: everything that we dealt with was improved. And a bit of clutter in the hallway was permanently eliminated.

Fun while it lasted! Now I’m back to worrying about Washington.

***

Is is 1860 again, or 1789? It’s the spirit of 1860, certainly. The country has devolved into contested territory, and each party has completely lost interest in what the other has to say. Both parties see themselves as crowned in virtue. That’s where 1789 comes in: I don’t think that anybody can gauge the possibilities for unintended disorder when the business of the government is interrupted. Determination has become generally reckless.

If I were younger, it might be exciting, but something tells me that if I were younger — a young person today, that is — I wouldn’t be paying attention. Sometimes I draw great hope from the way in which people under forty seem to see beyond the sclerosis that impedes almost all public affairs in our time. They must be seeing something, I imagine. But I’m not sure that I want to live through the ordeal of getting from here to there, whatever is that young people see. It often seems to involve little more than the death of my cohort, not the happiest of thoughts, even if I do rather agree and have felt as much since my cohort was in its teens. Boomers have no idea how thick they are, how solipsistic and incurious! But they’ve always been that, because they grew up at the center of attention. Boomers are like Long Island, the terminal moraine of generations so obsessed by the dread of decay and decrepitude that wisdom and maturity became simply unfashionable. Just as the willingness to compromise has become unfashionable in Washington.

Now, it’s true that most of the renegade Republicans are younger men; surely most of them aren’t yet fifty. But you can see that they’ve learned nothing from the past, because Boomers, the nearest witnesses, have had nothing to tell them. Nobody had anything to tell Boomers, either. I can remember that pretty clearly. Instead of being presented with living models of adult behavior, we were parked in front of the television, and most of us grew up thinking that we were too smart to fall for the pitch of advertizing — exactly what the folks on the other side of screen wanted us to think.

Do you remember the climax of that movie about Patsy Cline? They’re flying along when the clouds break and suddenly there is this cliff dead ahead. The End. Right now reminds me of that.

In this morning’s Times, there’s a front-page story about a secessionist movement in the plains counties of eastern Colorado. This utterly rural region — without the artifice of state lines, it would include the locus of In Cold Blood — shares ever fewer values with the metropolitan corridor that runs along the foothills of the Rockies. It is unlikely that anything will come of the drive for 51st-Statehood, but it’s possible, and it is inevitable that state lines will have to be redrawn at some point — not at gunpoint, one hopes — so long as the Napoleonic State continues to be the model of sovereign governance.

The key characteristic of the Napoleonic State is the universal application of one code of law throughout the territory. The Napoleonic State is a modern invention, as its title indicates; the stepchild of Enlightenment philosophes who deplored the patchwork of customs barriers that made doing business with France unnecessarily difficult, it was enacted by the revolutionaries of 1789, but it was Napoleon’s prestige as an effective ruler that made it the model of modern government. We take it entirely for granted today. In the United States, of course, there are two codes of law, but they are applied universally, either throughout the Union (via federal law) or within each state. Localities are allowed to enact rules and regulations that are not in conflict with the two superior codes, but only rarely is a code law modified to suit local peculiarities. An example that illustrates the triviality of such exceptions obtains in New York County (Manhattan), where it is not permissible to make a right turn on a red traffic signal.

The Colorado secession movement, and others like it that are also mentioned in Jack Healy’s story, have one thing in common, and it is the root grievance that drove the American Revolution: unrepresentative government. The people of eastern Colorado feel that their representatives in the state legislature have no voice. Interestingly, this is not a problem at the federal level — not at the moment. The Fourth Congressional District of Colorado, which comprises the secessionist counties, is represented by conservative Cory Gardiner. State assemblies have been exploited to gerrymander homogenous congressional districts throughout the country, and, as the government shutdown demonstrates, it is possible for like-minded regions, despite their geographical dispersal, to wield enormous collective clout in Washington. But within the states, ironically, it is much harder for such insurgencies to gain traction.

Whether we’re looking at gerrymandered congressional districts or quirky secessionist movements, the underlying logic is the same: the thinly-populated parts of the country are no longer the American heartland. Metropolitan values no longer honor agrarian pieties. People who live in cities no longer blush to think how wicked their lives are, in contrast to those of the folks back home. There are, increasingly, no folks back home. Most Americans today were born in shapeless suburban sprawl, and they have had to cobble together their own ethics, without much input from preachers.

Fewer and fewer people live in towns like Cheyenne Wells, Colorado. But there are still lots of small, shrinking towns, and, in an ideal world, they would constitute their own state, Ruralia. In one sense, they already do. Ruralia might sound fanciful, but — in case of fire — a disproportionate number of servicemen and -women call it home, or did until they joined the Army to get a job.

I don’t think I’m the only one who’s bothered by that.

Thirty-two years ago today, Kathleen and I, freshly married, walked through the door of the New York Junior League, and upstairs to the reception that Kathleen’s mother had arranged with a view to perfection, which was in fact reached. It was a perfect day.

Today’s not so bad, either. I almost forgot about our anniversary, for just about the first time, because I’m so excited about the wedding of our very good friend Ms NOLA, which will take place in two days, on virtually the same October weekend as ours. I spent the afternoon with the bride-to-be and her mother, at the Museum, where we took in the textile show. The mother of the bride, nothing less than a gifted couturière herself, took the great interest in the fine needlework on display at the Museum.

“I don’t know what we’re going to do tomorrow,” said Ms NOLA, as we were leaving. Do tomorrow? I retorted. You’re going to take it easy and get ready for a party! That’s what I told her, and that’s what I’ve decided to do myself. I’ll celebrate the conjunction of anniversary and wedding with a little pontismo. Back on Monday!

***

The other night, when I was reading the Claudia Roth Pierpont piece about Philip Roth and his writer friends that I mentioned yesterday, I was driven into a pothole by a reference to Bellow’s being “in low spirits, recovering from the death of both his brothers and the end of his fourth marriage.” I threw down the magazine. “I’m sorry,” I burst out to Kathleen. “I think it’s fine that the Wife of Bath married five times, but any man who marries more than three times has a broken axle.”

When the lava cooled, Kathleen asked, “But why does the Wife of Bath get to marry five times?”

“Men.”

I’ve got a date with Kathleen for dinner at 8:30, and not in Yorkville.

Another sign, posted not far from this one, announces that the work on the 72nd Street Station is scheduled to conclude at the end of this month. There is already evidence of a good deal of dismantlement. Once the superstructures are gone, the sidewalks will be restored, and, years before the subway itself is operational, the streets and the sidewalks will return to normal. Work at 86th Street began about a year later, and is scheduled to end next year at this time. Even here, there are signs of retreat. Of course, there is the fine print aspect: note the “Phase 1.”

It is not uncommon to meet an older resident of the neighborhood who has sworn in blood never to patronise the new subway line, because of the assaultive disruptions that it wrought in everyday life. I am not among them, however. I hope to live to use the damned thing.

You’ll note that it’s the Q train that will be running — originating, thenceforth, at 96th and Second, instead of 57th and Seventh. This route will make use of a previously un- or under-used tunnel that feeds the last major piece of subway construction, the line that extended the Sixth Avenue trains under Roosevelt Island and into Queens. From the Upper East Side, the Q will run along the F (or is it V, now?) tracks through the station at 63rd and Lex (which does  not connect to the Lexington Avenue line) and westward beneath the Park, beyond the turn toward Sixth Avenue, heading instead for 57th and Seventh, thereby carrying Yorkvillians such as myself from home to Carnegie Hall in three stops, with no change! Upper Times Square and the Theatre District will be one stop beyond that.

When the “Second Avenue Subway” is extended to its full length, down to the Battery — assuming that such a thing happens — the line will be called the “T.” I don’t plan to live quite that long.

***

The strangest article in The New Yorker: Claudia Roth Pierpont writing about Philip Roth’s literary friends, and how they all laughed. The piece begins with a nice big mention of Veronica Geng, one of the funniest writers to work at the magazine in my lifetime, certainly, and a sadly missed worthsmith. (From a parody wedding announcement: “The bride, an alumna of the Royal Doulton School and Loot University … is also a descendant of Bergdorf Goodman of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Her previous marriage ended in pharmaceuticals.”) Geng was the writer I looked for back in the day. She died of brain cancer in 1997, having long since departed from the post-Fleishman magazine.

Philip Roth, according to Pierpont, was “among her steadiest visitors” at Sloan-Kettering, “sitting on the edge of her bed in order to feed her.” By this point in the piece, Geng has dropped out of the narrative, and is mentioned again only because hers was one of the many graves that Roth would live to stare into. Others would be filled by Bellow, Updike, Plimpton. The article is really about them, the big boys of American writing, 1950-2000. Pierpont’s essay has an indecent feel to it, simply because Roth himself is still alive. Why are we going through his scrapbooks, talking about him, in effect, as if he weren’t there?

I don’t much like any of these writers, myself. William Styron is the only big-shot member of the generation whom I can read with pleasure. Updike was a terrible aphortist, in the way a clever woman can be a terrible flirt. He couldn’t resist! The silken luxury of his mots interrupts the mind and discharges it: further thought is unnecessary. Roth I simply don’t talk about, because I have nothing good to say. He is not, to my ear, so much a bad writer as a mongrel writer, intelligent and common by turns. It is always a mistake to write in a common style, because nothing stales faster. The common writer gets to take his fame with him when he dies — if he hasn’t outlived it.

As for Bellow, I’ve read Herzog twice, but I think it was me, and where I was at, that made the book appealing — I was in the mood for Herzog’s whining. And, when it was new, Mr Sammler’s Planet seemed dire, set in a New York City denuded of glamour. I recall The Dean’s December with fondness, perhaps the Rumanian scenes were drolly exotic. But I had to put down The Adventures of Augie March midway, when it seemed that everyone was about to go to Mexico. Pierpont writes that Roth, almost paralyzed by admiration for Bellow’s first masterpiece, was “in thrall to its capaciousness, its ebullience, its startling reinvention of the American idiom.” My calendar of errors exactly. “Capaciousness” — how about exurban sprawl? A nightmarishly episodic disinclination to learn from the past? “Ebullience” — I don’t want to try to follow a novel that behaves like a puppy. As for the American idiom, it were far better to forget it than to fiddle with it.

That last crack is something of a pot-shot, because I do believe that Bellow’s manner of bathing American lingo in Jewish intentionality was transformative, and arguably the one positive change that American English has made from British English. It is not a matter of Yiddish expressions, although the ghosts of speech-patterns are palpable. Rather, Bellow assumes the plain, not-fancy seriousness of the Talmudic scholar, and proceeds to wrestle the jokey thoughtlessness of American speech to the ground.

But Augie himself was too much for me. There was too much of him. Had Bellow’s novel run the length of Candide, I’d have been impressed. But, adventure after adventure, Augie kept coming back for something new and different. Far from leading a life without a second act, he was, when I left him, about to embark on a seventh or an eighth.

***

There’s great food for thought in Thomas Friendman’s Op-Ed piece today: “Our Democracy Is at Stake.” Because Friedman’s call for majority rule in the United State, which he finds to be thwarted by the Tea Party opposition to Obama and Obamacare, parallels that of the Muslim Brotherhood for majority rule in Egypt. (This is not a point that he makes.)

The voters who put the Morsi regime into office wanted (presumably) to live in an Islamist state. The voters who put Obama into the White House, and most representatives on either side of the aisle into Congress, want to live in a pluralist state. Each faced and continues to face a determined minority opposition. In Egypt, the army came to the aid of that minority. Such an outcome is unlikely in the United States, but this doesn’t mean that our minority will not do everything it can to express (and not just talk about) its opposition. Sadly, neither nation offered or offers a procedure for exceptions within democracy.

How do the Swiss organize the respective cantons’ official languages? That might be worth looking into. There are a lot of Americans who want to live in what, for simplicity’s sake, we’ll call a “white” country. I don’t think that skin color is actually that important; it’s simply shorthand for a constellation of attitudes. Somebody like me, for example — a Northeastern intellectual feminist who would no sooner use a firearm than mount a Jetski — would be far more unwelcome in “White America” than a respectable, churchgoing dry-cleaner who happened to be “of color.” I know; I lived for several years in Texas, and spent as little time outside of cosmopolitan Houston as possible.

Would I say that my sojourn in the Lone Star State taught me to respect other people’s values? Yes and no. I don’t respect the values themselves, but I respect the fact that people are going to hold onto them until a deep personal experience inspires them to make a change. And I know that that deep personal experience is not going to be initiated by blather from the likes of me. How do we agree to share common ground? Might we not begin by acknowledging that we don’t share common ground in the first place?

Why does Obamacare have to be the law of the land? Why can’t it be a program of federal assistance that states or localities must opt into? It’s true that I would make this request anyway, even without the “shutdown,” because I believe that medical care is so vastly confused that no attempt at overriding improvement can fail to make things worse in a lot of cases.

In another Times piece — this one inherently interesting — Eduardo Porter suggests a very sensible explanation for the opposition of Republican extremists to Obamacare, as well as for John Boehner’s complicity in their coup:

Even Americans who say they dislike the law actually like many of its components. Nearly three-quarters approve of giving financial help to poor and moderate-income Americans to buy health insurance. Two-thirds approve of barring insurance companies from denying coverage because of somebody’s medical history. Three-quarters favor letting children stay on their parents’ insurance until they are 26.

Until now, social welfare programs in the United States have exhibited a “big hole,” Professor Skocpol said, consisting of nonpoor working-age Americans and their children. Obamacare closes a big chunk of it.

“The main beneficiaries tend to have lower wages, employed in smaller businesses that are not providing health insurance,” she said. “They are not elderly. They are also not the poorest.”

And they might be grateful to Democrats for the benefit.

To conservative Republicans, losing a large slice of the middle class to the ranks of the Democratic Party could justify extreme measures.

Perpend.

It is probably too late in the day for me to learn anything serious about economics. Plodding through Nicholas Wapshott’s Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics, I find the disputes to be incomprehensible, unless and until I translate the discussion into terms of “moneyed interests” and “social interests.” In an intelligent world, these groups would not conflict, but we’re far from intelligent: we are only beginning to know how money, on the one hand, and employment, on the other, interact. Sadly, we have learned nothing about incidental concentrations of wealth, except that they’re ugly. Most of what passes as “economics” is no more useful than Ptolemaic cosmology; it’s so much whistling in the dark. The economic history of the modern world is shallow, only a few centuries deep, but it is marked by such enormous material change in the fabric of everyday life, and by so many booms and panics, that it is hard to see what might be learned from it.

But then, I spend a lot of time alone. Thanking friends and former students for their helpful discussions of the drafts of A General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, Keynes wrote, “It is astonishing what foolish things one can temporarily believe if one thinks too long alone.”

***

After an early dinner, Kathleen had work to do, so I turned on the Morphine playlist and washed the dishes. But then I couldn’t turn it off. I carried the Nano into the blue room and stuck it into the dock that connects to a truly excellent pair of Tannoy speakers that I’ve had for ages but that seem to sound better the older they get. I slumped in my reading chair and sipped wine. (Too much wine — we had enjoyed a nice bottle of Bordeaux at dinner, and I’m enjoying a nice headache today.) The tracks clicked by. I was almost always happy to hear whatever was song came up next. Sometimes, the sequence was brilliant, as from the National Lampoon’s “Kung Fu Christmas” to Ray Parker’s “Jack and Jill.”Sometimes, a song that I hadn’t thought of came to mind, as did Red Norvo’s “‘Smarvellous,” to follow Diana Krall’s “Dancing in the Dark.” In a few cases, I actually made a note of my bright ideas.

As a work in progress, the playlist consists of two parts, the sequence and the heap. The heap is a pile of songs that I want to place somewhere in the sequence but for which no place has yet been found. Progress occurs when a song that I have just tacked onto the bottom of the list finds ready company in the heap, allowing me to build a sequential module of anywhere from two to six songs, adding further songs as they come to mind. Then I hunt through the sequence, the “finished” part of the list, for a spot where the module will fit. This is still fairly easy to do, for only a handful of numbers are bonded to their neighbors.

How long will the Morphine playlist be? I don’t know the answer to that, either. I can’t even guess. The sequence part of the playlist is well shy of a hundred, while, at this very moment, there are 10,455 songs on this laptop’s hard drive. None of that is “classical music.” How many songs am I crazy about? And where can I get a better recording of Paul Whiteman’s “Whispering”?

***

Megan mentioned that when she was telling Will that he’d be making a trip to New York early next year, he thought about it for a moment and said, “But I want to be in California in January.” He was assured that the visit would not last long. He is settling in nicely, as are his parents. We miss them madly, but we’re very happy for them.

For much of last week, I was absorbed by a book that I spotted in the window at Crawford Doyle, But where is the lamb?: Imagining the Story of Abraham and Isaac, by James Goodman. I was captivated by the dust jacket, which reproduced the feel of the Torah and Talmud codices that were on view a few years ago at Sotheby’s. The title is framed by a border in which all nineteen verses of Genesis 22 are printed. This tells the story of Abraham’s sacrifice of his son, Isaac, which is interrupted at the last minute, so that a ram is sacrificed in substitution.

This story has gripped the religious conscience of the West, Jewish and Christian alike, believer and non-believer, ever since the beginning of the Common Era. More than that, if we include Jubilees, the non-canonical addition to the Hebrew Bible, written in the Second Century BCE. Jubilees is the earliest recorded commentary, aside from mention in Scripture itself, on the story; had Jubilees entered the canon, we would be calling it a revision rather than a commentary. The Bible, as Goodman reminds us, is full of revisions, with the revised versions following the originals, not erasing them. Thus: two accounts of Creation, two Floods, two sets of Ten Commandments. Chronicles on top of Samuel and Kings. But there is only one account of the Sacrifice of Isaac — Genesis 22 — and it is very spare. It is so underwritten, in fact, that the case can be made, and has been made, that the sacrifice was completed as planned, and that Isaac was slain and his body burned. For, Scripture tells us, the Temple in Jerusalem was built upon the ashes of Isaac at Moriah. So was the Second Temple. The death of Isaac at his father’s hands is a minority reading, but it’s livelier than you might think.

Goodman’s book is a relaxed but searching history of responses to Genesis 22. It is written in an agreeable voice, at least to these ears: Goodman sounds, above all, like an intelligent New Yorker. What bothers him about the story is that Abraham never protests God’s command. This seems wrong, and also out of character, for Abraham has a history of questioning God.

I was stunned. It was not at all what I had anticipated. I had no illusions about God, not after Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, the Great Flood, and the Tower of Babel. (I have never been persuaded that the citizens of that apparently peaceful place, working together and getting along, had done anything wrong.) Nor confidence that I could predict his behavior or fathom what he was thinking. Still, I harbored a sneaking suspicion that it was not what God had anticipated either. But what could he do? He tried to make the best of a difficult situation, adjust on the fly, cut his losses and Abraham’s too. Look forward. Move on. Try not to let one bad day spoil the rewards of a good long life. Sometimes events take unexpected turns, even when you are thought to have everything under control.

And what could I do?

He could write this book, which in the course of its narrative explores the story of Abraham and Isaac from every which way, addressing its moral thorniness (how could God ask such thing?), its theological mystery (why does God feel the need to test Abraham? Doesn’t he know?), and the almost infinitely varied interpretations to which it has been subjected (early Christians in Syria composed chants in Sarah’s voice, even though Sarah is conspicuously absent from Genesis 22). It would be foolish to attempt to encapsulate here what is already in itself the smallest possible capsule that Goodman could design to contain the best of what has been written about this story. I have quoted a mere paragraph just to suggest the kind of company that Goodman’s reader can expect to keep, with a host who is genial but not sunny, inquisitive but not obsessive. A man whose sense of ignorance fans his enthusiasm for perpetual learning. Perhaps a quip from the end of the book will fix this picture.

A trade book editor, another fan, said he was fascinated by the subject and intrigued by my take on it, but he wondered if I was qualified to write the book. “You have no training or special experience in any relevant area,” he said. “You don’t even have the languages you would need.”

“It is worse than that,” I said to him (and forever afterward to anyone who would listen). “The real problem is not that I am not qualified. It is that I know how much I do not know.”

And yet: But where is the lamb? is a graduate thesis in the non-academic discipline of Lay Inquiry, and the reader has no choice but to grant Goodman this crowning degree among the educated pursuits.

It can be argued — bearing in mind that Goodman’s book offers proof that almost anything can be argued — that the central question underlying Isaac’s question, which is also the title of the book, pertains to qualifications. Who is A to do x? Who is God to demand the sacrifice of Isaac? Who is Abraham not to utter a word of protest? Who is Goodman to write this book? Sheherazade comes to mind: Goodman establishes his credentials simply by gripping the reader from episode to episode of articulate response. Few books have held the totality of my attention as well as this one, and, for two days after putting it down, I was gravely discontent with all other reading material on offer. Even though I am not a believer, and yet perhaps because, having been raised Roman Catholic, I was kept well ignorant of the Bible throughout childhood, I find that few things occupy my mind as fully, as comprehensively as Scripture. The Bible is the compleat book: it’s got everything. (The only thing that could improve it would be to substitute the work of Jane Austen for the Book of Esther. Since God appears in neither, I can’t think what would be lost.) It sustains a galaxy of criticism that no one could ever read entire; there is even a canon of Non-Scripture (the Apocrypha, books such as Jubilees, the items in the Nag Hammadi Library). And there is the State of Israel, embodying in our time the contention witnessed in Scripture.

There is much to deplore in Scripture. (Judges 19 is my personal favorite for horror.) But Scripture is too massive to quibble with. It reminds me, perhaps impiously, of that spacecraft in the first of the Star Trek movies, a Voyager vessel (it calls itself Veejer) that, in the course of its wanderings, has accumulated all the powers of the universe, and now returns homewards with the confused  determination to cleanse the Earth of “carbon units.” Such is the fright of looking into the eyes of God.

***

For centuries — no one knows for how many — Genesis 22 appears to have been an enigmatic or mysterious episode that readers accepted as such. Then, at about the time of Jubilees, they found that they could not; they must, as Abraham failed to do, protest. Why? My hunch is that the another sort of Veejer disturbed the Jewish world: Hellenism. Hellenism was the pop culture of the day, from the wake of Alexander until the onslaught of Islam nearly a thousand years later. Everyone wore a sort of everyday Hellenism, just as everyone wears jeans today. It doesn’t mean much, and yet — well, jeans are thought to be sexy. When I was a boy, you were not supposed to look sexy unless you were a woman going out to a party, and even then, “sexy” was not the word. So blue jeans changed a lot. The hellenic equivalent of blue jeans, as I see it, was the law against contradictions. A thing either is or it isn’t. Nothing can be both a sphere and a cube (ie, not a sphere).

Ever since, the law against contradictions has formed the foundation of educated common sense in the West. So much so that we have no idea how unusual it is, or how foreign to the rest of the world. We also forget how much trouble it has created in our own. Read Geza Vermes’s marvelous final book, Christian Beginnings, and watch the story of a Jewish holy man, not terribly unlike many before him, distend this way and that in response to the horror of contradictions. What, for example, was the meaning of the Resurrection? Assuming that it occurred, what were its implications? These had to be worked out without contradiction. How did it differ from the Ascension of Elijah? Who was Jesus? It was not sufficient to call him a holy man; he had to be something more than that. But what? Next thing you know, Christianity was working its way toward polytheism, in the form of a trinity that it insisted, not very convincingly to outsiders, upon worshiping a “triune” god. Does “trinity” signify three things, or one thing in three parts, and, if the latter, what exactly is a “part”? Your (correct!) decision or your life! Because what follows immediately from the law against contradictions is that you must be either right or wrong.

We have learned, I think, to restore a reverence for mystery, at least in areas of faith. (The Roman Catholic Church never abandoned it, but exploited it as the “explanation” of everything that was inexplicable.) We are learning to be comfortable with ignorance wherever being so is safe. We are beginning to learn. At the same time, we have to be careful about avoiding mystification, which is never anything more than intriguing nonsense. Such as the civilian’s right to bear arms, anytime, anywhere. (We avoid this nonsense at airports, it will be noted.) Or that nuclear power is too dangerous to utilize.

But where is the lamb? opens a small seam on the problem of contradiction: in rare but important cases, the body of contradictory explanations is itself the best answer. I’m going to be looking for Goodman’s book on thoughtful readers’ shelves.

One-sentence review: Don Jon instantiates the well-established truth that, in order to sustain meaningful contact with another human being in public, you must leave New Jersey and cross over into Manhattan, if only for the day.

Don Jon is too fresh to be manhandled by the likes of me, so I’ll just scatter a few notes. I expected something really good from Joseph Gordon-Levitt, a young man whose quirky boyishness has never concealed a very sharp mind, but I wasn’t expecting anything as original as Don Jon. The trajectory of the plot stands in relation to Hollywood-normal as HAL does to IBM, and some early audiences may find it dissatisfying. But Gordon-Levitt knows what he’s doing, and Don Jon is a movie that everyone is going to learn to love, even at the cost of finding out that Scarlett Johansson’s adorably Streisandesque Barbara Sugarman isn’t — but stay, hush. Don Jon doesn’t go where it leads you to think it’s going to go, because it has even better ideas. And beneath the Jersey sprawl beats an elegant heart.

There ought to be an Academy Award for great casting. Glenne Headley and Tony Danza, demonstrating that they have been severely underrated by the Industry, bring you immediately into the bosom of their characters’ family and manage to persuade you that you might, under different circumstances, like  to be part of it. (Just as you knew you didn’t ever want to have dinner with the parents in Silver Linings Playbook.) Julianne Moore finds yet a another new way in which to be unsettling, but this time it’s the hero that she disturbs, not the audience. She goes from looking like someone who doesn’t belong in Jon’s world to being someone who will change it forever. It must be acknowledged that she has a lot of help from her costar.

It’s hard to say where Gordon-Levitt the screenwriter leaves off and Gordon-Levitt the actor picks up, but they collaborate so well that they seem to be one person, never moreso than when Jon is meant to be seen in unflattering light. There are some extraordinarily good running jokes. I will allude only to the one (one-and-a-half?) that involves confession and penance. The confession bit is slightly confused, as, in the movie, this sacrament seems to follow the sacrament that it is designed to precede. But perhaps this is part of the joke, an ostensible concession that the writer doesn’t really understand how these holy things work. (PS: He does.) Now. And in the hour. Of our death. I forget whether or not Jon throws in a groaned Amen; I lost count of the reps.

But there is also a sublimely funny scene, not involving jokes of any kind, that lingers as an afterburn. Washing his dishes and Windexing his mirrors, Joe Martello reminds us that good housekeeping is an important part of military life. Who would imagine that any woman in this day and age would regard his being conscientious about squeaky-clean kitchen floors as a turn-off?

Even more sublime — unless it’s incompetent, which I doubt — is the drama-in-reverse that connects Jon’s manner behind the wheel of his car (where we catch him, it seems, always on his way to Mass) and the reason that Esther lives alone in her house.

We can talk about this more fully later, when the movie comes out on DVD.

***

It is not often that I haul out the dictionary. If I am at all uncertain of a word’s meaning, I locate a definition on the Internet, simply because it makes better sense to do so from a descriptivist standpoint: that’s what my readers are likely to do if they’re uncertain. Sometimes, however, I need more than that, a real authority, with the significant extras that only a good dictionary can offer.

I clearly remember the first time I came across the word “overdetermined.” It was in the pages of Harold Bloom’s important if repetitious study, The American Religion. The word appeared quite often, but I couldn’t think what it meant. Although I read a lot of Freud in college and after, I had somehow missed this word; or, perhaps, I understood it in the clinical sense (in the interpretation of dreams) but only in that sense. What I probably missed was the appropriation of psychoanalytic lingo by academic critics that occurred, roughly, during my undergraduate years, but that I missed because I was entirely wrapped up with Great Books and had no interest in current fashions. So, “overdetermined” seemed as odd in the context of discussing religious sects as “metastatized” would have been a century ago. I decided that this use of “overdetermined” was jargon, and not worth using.

Until the other day, that is. The other day, I overheard someone say, “Ultimately, it all comes down to sex.” Sex drives everything, even (especially) when you think it doesn’t. We’re all familiar, by now, not only with this line of thinking but also with its tiresomeness. “Sex,” as Bill Clinton reminded us, means different things to different people. And no doubt because the ultimate prime mover in this instance was held to be sex, I reflected that the reproductive and excretory functions are, even in rather primitive animals, like two different trains making use of the same tracks. You would think that, if ultimately, it all came down to sex, we would all have very special organs reserved to the purpose. But we do not.

The impulse to find ultimate causes is “irresistible” but, happy, not really, and I believe that life becomes both more promising and more interesting when you stop trying to pin them down. True, it also becomes more complex, and sometimes dizzyingly multifaceted. But, from what I cam make out of neurobiology from my seat high up in the peanut gallery, searching for the neuron or even the region of the brain that controls this or that high-level function is likely to be fruitless. Thoughts and feelings are overdetermined, “caused” by so many mental functions that the notion “causation” itself dissolves into meaninglessness.

The physical world, or rather the world studied by the physical sciences, seemed for a long time to follow a tight set of rules in which identical causes always and everywhere produced identical effects, but particle theory has undermined that simplicity. Even so, the physical world remains vastly more comprehensible than the biological world, which had led to many cases of Physics Envy. Physics Envy is the attempt — not just the desire — to frame a highly contingent body of data in the straightforward, reciprocal propositions of Newtonian science. Take economics. Economics is the study of human transactions. How passionately academic economists have wished and pretended that the humans engaged in transactions behaved as simply and predictably as planets! But they don’t.

***

In these trying times of falls from fiscal cliffs, we naturally ponder the difference between liberals and conservatives. I don’t have anything terribly new to contribute to this analysis, but I think about it a lot, because I am so puzzled by myself. I ought to be a conservative. In many outward ways, I look like a conservative. I prefer old things to new ones; I’m reluctant to try out new schemes that bear traces of old ones that have never, as I can tell, been well understood. (Almost every proposal for educational reform is littered with scraps from the discard pile — excepting, of course, the altogether intelligent idea, now gaining force against the odds, that public school districts ought not to be in the business of funding and operating sports programs.) I’m a thoroughgoing elitist: we are always weighing things and finding some better than others, and the people with the best minds ought to be the people in charge of affairs. (Mind you, it is rare for a “best mind” to survive higher education undamaged.) I believe that we can all do better. We can make the world a better place.

But that’s just it! History clearly shows, I believe, that we are doing better. This is not to invoke the triumphalist chimeras of progress; we’re not doing that much better. But we have improved, as a race, since Ur of the Chaldees. War and pestilence are the great obstacles tothis improvement, but even there we have a knack for clutching small victories from the mouth of catastrophe. (The Black Death, horrible as it was, put an end to villeinage in much of England, which subsequently developed a standard of personal liberty that is now the global ideal.) We inch forward. Perhaps we are not moving fast enough; maybe we’ve done so much harm to earth’s biosphere that we’re already doomed. Maybe. Because I see no point in acting on such a belief, I don’t entertain it. We move slowly, but we move as fast as we can.

So I’m not a conservative, because I don’t share the core conservative credo, which holds that mankind is fallen and given inexorably to sin. People will be wicked and evil whenever they feel the need to be. There is no point to dreaming of improvements; we must make the best of what we have.

There’s a world of difference between making the best of what you have and making the world a better place. But it shrinks to the size of a quark in the presence of people who are simply itching for excitement.

In the event of a sequester, or “government shutdown,” or other Tea-Party-induced shock, it will be very interesting to see what, if any, impact the crisis has on the wealth of the Washington metropolitan area. According to Richard Florida (writing in The Atlantic), the nation’s capital and its environs comprise the fourth-richest metropolitan region in the United States, it includes six of the ten most affluent counties in the country. Florida claims that “its economy is not entirely or even predominantly parasitic,” but he does not enlarge on this point. I wonder. To the extent that it is parasitic, how vulnerable will it prove to be to federal cutbacks? The underlying question is simple: what stake do the people in and around Washington have in the nation’s health?

Considering this question, along with the obscene inequality in income-distribution, I worry that American élites believe that they’re protected from adversity by wealth and privilege. This is what the aristocrats (especially the recently-ennobled ones with money) thought before 1789. I worry that any serious attempt to fix what ails the United States will bring forth not so much a process of reform as a maelstrom that nobody can control.

What is to be done?

Here’s something interesting that I had never heard about: Distributism. Garry Wills mentions it in passing in a review of the work of J F Powers in the current issue of the NYRB.

In England, neo-medievalism took the form of Distributism—G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc opposing both socialism (abolishing private property) and capitalism (concentrating private property), to promote the widest distribution of private property. One way to distribute property more widely, and to withdraw from modern industrialism, was to cultivate one’s own small farm. Distributists called people back to the land not only in England but even more effectively in America, where it showed up in the Rural Life Movement, and even in the Southern Agrarians. The repudiation of the machine age made one British Distributist, the Dominican Vincent McNabb, refuse to use any machine, even a typewriter. It was a compromise with modernity for him to write with a fountain pen instead of a quill.

I quote the entire paragraph just to get it out of the way: Distributism, as envisioned by Chesterton and Belloc, was little more than a disguised antiquarianism. We might just as well try to go back to Sturbridge Village. (And restore the Vatican hegemony of Innocent III while we’re at it.) But! The idea of a coherent economic program between socialism and capitalism is an enticing prospect indeed. It would necessarily feature an economic arrangement that discouraged (excessive, capitalistic) concentrations of wealth. It would also impose limits on rentes — unearned incomes.

At the risk of annoying everyone, I’ll repeat two convictions that I reached long ago.

• Corporations must be stripped of their “natural personhood,” and rendered incapable of owning intellectual property of any kind. To put it another way, intellectual property ought to be licenseable but inalienable.
• Densely-settled real property ought to be owned and developed by not-for-profit corporations. Established utilities and other mature businesses (even commercial banking) ought to operate as not-for-profit organizations. Entrepreneurship, with its risks and rewards, ought to be reserved for industrial innovation, not financialization.

Neither of these things is going to happen tomorrow. But each of them could be introduced on a small-scale, local basis. Without the need for tax engineering, they would all conduce to distribute wealth more evenly. I also believe that they would nurture a growth in the number of jobs overall and of satisfying jobs in particular.

Pie in the sky? All my program needs is a supermax enhancement of the human capacity for taking the long view. Simple!

At long last, I have begun compiling a playlist of favorite pieces of music in all genres. I’ve been meaning to do it for years, but I was stymied by the consequences of a decision that I made when I first encountered iTunes: the serious music is on one computer, and everything else is on the laptop. So I’m concocting the list “bareback,” as it were, on the iPod itself, which means that, if the device crashes, I’ve got to reconstruct the list. (I’m keeping a printed list.)

The range is fairly wide, I think you’ll agree — from the “Domine Deus” in Bach’s B-Minor Mass to Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love.” The idea is to include everything that I’m crazy about, but in such an order that each piece is precisely what the preceding one makes me want to hear next. Such a playlist would become dull pretty quickly if it were also not very long, very long. I intend to fill a 16G Nano with it. So far, there are only 63 songs on the list, with a runtime of four hours. That barely scratches the surface. I’ll be working on this project right up until lights-out.

As a matter of habit, I entitled the playlist, “Fun,” but as I was washing up after dinner last night I realized that the it really ought to be called “Morphine.”

“Morphine” is not intended to be a party tape. It may be a playlist that I alone can bear to listen to, but that doesn’t matter, because it’s what I’m going to play when I’m doing chores. Consider the first five selections: “Cachapaya,” a Peruvian ditty sung by the Swingle Singers; Morton Gould’s insane arrangement of “Limehouse Blues” — if you don’t know the tune, you won’t learn it from this chart; “La panse,” a silly Italian song performed by Karl Zéro (remember him?); Josef Strauss’s Delirien Waltz; and Sidney Bechet’s version of “Si tu vois ma mère,” the recording that Woody Allen used to open Midnight in Paris.

Right now, Christine Lavin’s “Prince Charles,” a naughty song that time has made even more incredibly, deliciously “inappropriate,” follows the Gould, but I’ve marked the printed list with instructions to move it out of the way; it’s too low-key, musically, for the sequence. I know: I’ll put it between “Gimme a Little Kiss, Will Ya Huh?” and “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.”

***

Kathleen bought a big book about Vogue, and we were leafing through it last night. I was reminded of her latest hairdo. Every week, Kathleen has her hair washed and dried at a salon that specializes in dealing with very long hair. (When it reaches her waist, she has hers trimmed.) Every week, Kathleen comes home with a different sort of knot at the back of her head, some of them pretty fantastical. After a day or so, she has to take them down, and, for the rest of the week, she makes simple buns out of a braid, which is fine. But last Saturday, Kathleen came home with a different face. The woman who arranges her hair had done something entirely new, weaving a french braid (if that’s what you call it) away from her temples, giving her the look of a woman in Nattier. It was extraordinarily attractive, and I urged her to have it done that way before public appearances and big meetings.

Have it done. I thought about ladies’ maids, and, looking at the pages from Vogue, I saw at once that that was what killed fashion: the end of ladies’ maids. Not only did a lady’s maid manage her mistress’s wardrobe, and actually get her into her clothes (which no one could do unaided), but she arranged the lady’s hair as well. To look fashionable requires either an assistant of some kind or a radically scaled-back idea of fashion. We live in a compromise world. Most women, of course, don’t have ladies’ maids, even very affluent women; but those models in Vogue — they don’t just have maids, they have staffs. Nobody appears in a magazine untouched by the hands of another — several others. Nor on television.

And I thought about the wickedness of advertising, which exploits this arrangement while concealing it. In the Times today, Patricia Cohen reviews the latest contribution to the having-it-all debate, a book by Barnard president Debora Spar called Wonder Woman. Cohen writes,

The theme she uses to tie it all together is the quest for perfection. Since the 1970s, women have been laboring under impossible expectations to run Fortune 500 companies, sell homemade brownies at bake sales, look like Victoria’s Secret models and be ever-ready bed mates. Want more, do more, be more. For the teenage Ms. Spar, this ideal was embodied in commercials for Charlie perfume, which promised that you could be a gorgeous woman with a briefcase and a young child. What seemed effortless on TV was in real life absolutely exhausting.

The awful truth is that most advertising is science fiction, set in an alternative universe that you will never visit. Nobody actually lives there, except perhaps for the trophy wives of a few dozen plutocrats — and, boy, are they ever tired of each others’ company! Even they can’t live there full-time, because even from the back seats of their luxurious black cars they are obliged to look out not upon the pine forests and cliffbound seascapes that appear in automobile ads but rather upon the same public roads that we all use. From time to time, their vehicles must wait at intersections. This never happens in the ads.

I don’t believe that anyone is too smart to be seduced by advertising. Only damaged minds are safe. Take your pick.

***

Something funny going around on Facebook:

Ladies, if a man says he will fix it, he will. There is no need to remind him every 6 months.

It’s a graphic, so it couldn’t be cut-and-pasted, and I had the devil of a time copying it. It’s so terse — which is what makes it funny-but-not-ha-ha for me. It does not say, “Ladies, if a man says that he will fix something, he will fix it. There is no need to remind him about it every six months.” Perhaps “terse” isn’t the word. “Incomplete” is better. “Understood” is the term that gets used in grammar books. Whatever. The language is part and parcel of the procrastination. It says, just as it states, the one and only thing that men of this type have to say: leave me alone. Which also means: stop talking.

What would it be like to have the verbal-acuity equivalents of “tall” and “fat” and so on. There are so many different ways of speaking the same language — especially English, it seems; but what would I know? — and a handful of classifiers would be handy. For example, I’ve always wondered why people who don’t like to talk much go to cocktail parties. Do they even know that they don’t like to talk? Wouldn’t it be helpful if they did? Then they could say, “I’m x, so I don’t go to cocktail parties.” Or they could do something about the x.

As I was getting dressed for dinner last night, my eye fell on the spine of a book on the lowest shelf of a bookcase. It was a book that I’d read in the spring or early summer, but not found a more permanent place for. Gawd, it hit me. Looking up a few books, I saw, just beneath the one on top, Geza Vermes’s Christian Beginnings, a book that I had spent hours last week trying to find. In that very bookcase. It never occurred to me to check the bottom shelf, which I seem to have forgotten rearranging. After giving up on the search a week ago, I bought the book again, this time for the Kindle. But the moment of interest had passed. I had moved on in another direction altogether, although it was also one inspired by Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Silence. Not only have I been working my way through Black’s Reign of Elizabeth, but I’ve finally got past the first act of The Winter’s Tale, a play that hitherto rebuffed me.

I see why: The Winter’s Tale is too dramatic. Too dramatic to make a good read. It begins with an explosion of jealousy for which the reader has not been prepared. Theatre audiences, of course, require no such preparation: they’re always ready for a surprise, as long as it’s really exciting. And Leontes’ insane suspicions of his queen, Hermione, are really exciting, because they are insane. Or are they? Do they not spring from misgivings about the changing role of women in the world?

Like Shakespeare’s romantic heroines, Hermione (who isn’t quite one of them) is very clever. Her wit and dash endear her to us, not least because centuries of familiarity have taught us to love Shakespeare’s dry dames. But perhaps Hermione is too clever. When, at Leontes’ instance, she persuades his oldest friend in the world, another king, Polixenes of Bohemia, to tarry in Sicilia, which Leontes rules (just for good measure and bad geography, Hermione is the daughter of the Emperor of Russia), Leontes tells her that she has never spoken better — except once. When was that, Hermione wants to know, perhaps pushing the point a bit too far.

My last good deed was to entreat his stay.
What was my first? It has an elder sister,
Or I mistake you. O, would her name were Grace!

Leontes tells her that the other occasion was her acceptance of his marriage suit. Hermione purrs,

                     ‘Tis grace indeed!
Why, lo you now, I have spoke to the purpose twice;
The one forever earned a royal husband,
Th’other for some while a friend.

And she walks off with Polixenes, holding hands. Leontes fills out her line:

                                       Too hot, too hot!
To mingle friendship far is mingling bloods.

What Hermione has misguidedly mingled is her “purposed” speeches. She projects, however unwittingly, a parallelism: although her second “successful” remark earned “for some while a friend,” rather than “forever … a royal husband,” this temporal difference does not block the inference, drawn by Leontes, that what she has done with one man, she might do with the other. That this purely verbal indiscretion bears such calamitous fruit bears out Shakespeare’s belief that words are more dangerous than deeds.

We like Hermione, as I say; we root from her from the start. But Leontes has not had our advantage; he has not grown up reading Twelfth Night or Much Ado About Nothing. He is, like most of Shakespeare’s men, a medieval figure — late, perhaps, but still medieval. (Romeo and Hamlet, although clearly men of the Renaissance, have the misfortune to live under the old dispensation.) It goes without saying, in the medieval worldview, that women are lesser creatures, subordinate to men. In no way can wives be permitted to outshine their husbands.

It goes without saying, but Leontes says it, anyway, in II.3, his scene with Paulina. Paulina, a lady of the court, insists that Leontes recognize his new-born child, the baby girl who will grow up to be Perdita, and whom Leontes believes to be Polixenes’s bastard. Leontes refuses to answer Paulina, but addresses only her husband, Antigonus, whom he will later charge with putting the baby to death by exposure. He tells the man to silence his wife, and is aghast at Antigonus’s inability to do so. Frances Dolan, the editor of the Pelican edition, summarizes Leontes’s expostulations in her Introduction to the play.

The abuse he directs at Paulina in II.3 taps into persistent associations in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English culture: (1) an assertive woman must have a weak husband, since only one spouse can wear the breeches or rule the roost; (2) a woman who cannot hold her tongue cannot preserve her chastity or refrain from violence; (3) a woman who asserts herself inevitably takes something away from men, effeminizing them and masculinizing herself; (4) domestic and political disobedience imply and promote one another.

It would not be said that Hermione cannot hold her tongue, but her cleverness suggests a certain assertiveness, and her daring wit even moreso.

So Leontes is not nuts after all: he’s just a red-blooded king of the old school. Of course, he apologizes the moment the oracle disabuses him, but it’s too late by then, or seems to be.

Now, at any rate, I have reached the altogether stranger feature of the play, the sixteen-year gap in the action that falls between Acts III and IV. (Like the Sleeping Beauty, who comes to mind more than once in this play, Perdita grows up in the interval.) Act IV, by the way, is nearly as long as the first three acts combined, and its fourth scene runs for an extraordinary thirty pages (836 lines). Take a deep breath!

***

I have two copies of the play — two copies of the same edition. I used to believe that it made more sense to have one big book of Shakespeare than lots of little ones, and it does, but only for research purposes. If you want to read a play, from first act to last, the big book will soon prove to be tiresome, too heavy to hold up for any time and too finely printed to read with comfort. (IV, iv is crammed into fewer than nine pages in the big book.) Being stupid, I took a while to understood why I had come to regard reading Shakespeare as a chore.

The Pelican singles are cheaper than almost all other paperbacks: $8.00. (Each issue of The New Yorker costs nearly that, not that subscribers pay any such freight). What I’ll do with the little book when I’m done, I don’t know. I expect I’ll have to give it away — I absolutely do not have room to keep it.

I’ve also got the paperbacks of two other plays that have given me trouble in the past, Troilus and Cressida and Cymbeline. I’m going to try to read them as if I were sitting in the theatre, too.

***

Last night, whilst Kathleen plied her needle, I read aloud from The Reign of Elizabeth and was struck, at one point, by the beauty of the near-scansion in the construction of a sentence. In his great book on style, F L Lucas cautions against metrical prose, as likely to provoke “mirth or irritation” in the reader. “Prose needs a less obtrusive, more elusive, kind of music. That’s what I liked about Black’s sentence — the meter was elusive. It was there, but not when you looked. This morning, I looked through the whole chapter, trying to find this lovely sentence, which I had repeated so many times — Kathleen quite liked it, too — that I’d entirely forgotten what it was about. All that I could be sure of was that it came from the long central chapter on “Literature, Art, and Thought.” I called Kathleen at work. Could she recall the subject matter? No. She’d know the sentence if she saw it… A few minutes later, I called her back: I’d found it. The topic was, of all things, alchemy. The beautiful part of the sentence follows the semicolon.

Doubtless there were some who practiced alchemy with honest intent; but the great majority were sharks who preyed on the credulity and greed of an acquisitive age.

Who was it said that all history is current history?

This afternoon, I’ll be preparing a get-together dinner that I’m pretty sure will be enjoyed on the balcony this evening. The menu will feature nothing special, at least in the way of home-made dishes. Grilled chicken and baby-back ribs — they’re already marinating. Corn on the cob, roast sweet potatoes, and a big bowl of cole slaw from Schaller & Weber. Baguettes and a couple of pies from Fairway. A pitcher of Arnold Palmers.

I make it sound so easy that I’m almost fooled myself.

There ought to be fish on the menu. Also, more vegetables. I know what I’ll do about the vegetables: I’ll chop up summer squash and cherry tomatoes and shallots, and put them in a pot with some olive oil. Then, into the oven. I used to make this every day when I had a microwave oven. Inevitably, I got tired of it; I also got tired of how much room the microwave oven took up. So it has been a nice while. As for the fish, a cold poached filet of salmon might be nice. In which case, I’m going to head down to Agata & Valentina. The fish is better there.

More than ever, though, the food isn’t the point. Fossil Darling and Ray Soleil will be here, and so will Ms NOLA and Messir di T — for whom I shall have to invent a new, married name, as tonight’s visit will probably be their last as fiancés. Our other guests will be neighbors. After years and years of polite “hellos” in the elevator,  we have made some friends in the building, and it turns out that they’ve all known each other for ages. So we’re sort of their new friends rather than the other way round. If Megan and Ryan and Will were here, it would be a real family dinner — but it will be “real family” even without them, just not complete.

(Megan & Co are installed in their newly-rented house in the very part of San Francisco where they hoped to live, and they’re exhausted. Will, I’m told, has, on more than one occasion, asked to “go back.” Sometimes, he’s referring to New York. Sometimes, he just means the apartment in SOMA that they occupied for three weeks. I expect that he’ll stop talking about going back shortly. He’s crazy about the Zoo.)

Still, I can’t help wishing that I were doing something ambitious. Which is to say: I miss, just a bit, being young.

***

At the downtown storage unit the other day, I had a bright idea. I used my iPhone to take pictures of the barcodes printed on the dust-jackets of several books that I want to hold on to and eventually send uptown. What with my shaky hand, it was hard to get clear images, but I managed, in two out of three cases. I’ve just discovered, however, that the barcode reader can’t work with a screen. That horizontal red light doesn’t even register over the phone. So I copied in the ISBNs manually, and that worked. The point of this exercise was to try to avoid taking a laptop to the storage unit, with all the paraphernalia required (the portable barcode scanner, which doesn’t work as well, and the MiFi card for wireless hookup), every time I want to sort books.

The other night, I wanted to read a good, solid history book from the old days. Little did I foresee what I would encounter.

I pulled down a book that I hadn’t read before, J B Black’s The Reign of Elizabeth. First published in 1936 (my reprint dates from 1949), this slim volume belongs to the Oxford History of England series, a grand old shelf of books with the stout look and feel of a university library. When I was at boarding school, I bought E F Jacob’s The Fifteenth Century, a thick tome remarkable for never referring to the aristocratic upsets that disturbed England for thirty years as “the Wars of the Roses.” I cannot say that I have read it from cover to cover, although I’ve read other entries in the series, namely the three preceding ones. Elizabeth was acquired in a half-hearted flurry of completism and lined up with the others. I expected it to put me to sleep, and it did, but not without hooking me on the story first.

And what is this story? It is not a biography of the queen herself. It is the history of England, not the lives of its rulers, after all, that the series claims to relate. At the same time, few English monarchs have had a higher profile. It is impossible to read about Elizabeth Tudor without meditating on the the chanciness of timing. Is it just the illusion of retrospect, or was Elizabeth an awesome case of the right woman at the right time? And what was so right about her, really? She left a strong impression of shaping the character of modern England, almost of creating the kingdom of which so many generations have been proud to be subjects, but does this amount to more than sentimental piffle?

Don’t worry,  that’s not the story. The story is about an Oxford don — an Aberdeen don, actually — who weaves a narrative from the historical records. We need not concern ourselves with what those might be, although I have always wondered what it must be like to peruse the vast corpus of Venetian diplomatic reports, because the footnotes that refer to them always seem to contain the most trenchant tidbits. We are not going to inquire into the historian’s methods, now or seventy-odd years ago. We are simply going to bear in mind that a history book written in 1936 is, to some inescapable extent, a book about 1936, or about a more or less superseded way of going about things.

For example, it’s unlikely that anybody today would write a magnificent, but “editorializing,” sentence such as this one, about Philip II of Spain’s problems in the Low Countries.

The fact that Philip was a foreigner, unimaginative, slow of mind, maladroit, and altogether devoid of that higher statesmanship that takes into account the idiosyncrasies of the people committed to its care, probably increased the difficulties in the way of a mutual understanding, and lessened the chances of fruitful cooperation.

I shouted with glee: the style is perfect. We have, first, four brief characteristics, arranged in worsening order, with the third, “slow of mind,” a halting way of saying “stupid” that anticipates “maladroit.” It’s brilliant! Then, a gliding but complex statement about the duties of the statesman — which of course Philip altogether lacked, and which failing, together with the others, probably — ! — made things worse. It is a “Life of Philip” in one sentence.

Here’s another gem. It relates to the general concern that Elizabeth find a husband and produce a successor, someone other than her cousin Mary Stuart.

In the upper house the earls of Leicester and Pembroke and the duke of Norfolk insisted that a husband should be forcefully imposed upon Elizabeth and the succession regulated by parliamentary statute. For this rank impertinence they were excluded from the presence-chamber, and had to sue for pardon on their knees.

In my days as an ambitious but lazy student, I may not have finished all the books that I started, but I read enough of this sort of thing for it to form the foundation of my own style: “rank impertinence,” when I came upon it, felt like a long-lost cousin, or, in the alternative, something that I might very plausibly write myself, if the situation demanded. There is a finer art at work; it lies in not mentioning the queen in the second sentence. Here we have an example of the strengths of the passive voice, which can magnify unseen powers. The incident is nicely vague; we’re not told anything about the conditions of the exclusion from the “presence chamber,” but we’re informed that it was awful enough to bring three powerful peers to their knees. (At the same time, one can’t help being relieved that, in those wild times, none of them was beheaded. Rash impertinence is not the worst thing in the world.)

A page later, Black writes,

Is it surprising that Elizabeth felt justified in her resistance to parliament’s demands? Their way was the way to chaos: hers was the way to peace.

Black wraps up the episode with a remark by William Camden, the antiquarian who died in 1623:

Thus by a woman’s wisdom she suppressed these commotions, which Time so qualified, shining ever clearer and clearer, that very few, but such as were seditious or timorous, were troubled with care about a successor.

The quote from Camden is very much a part of the story that would not be told today; all that it attests to, fairly, is the glorification of Elizabeth, already well in train during the reign of her successor — who turned out to be not Mary Stuart but Mary’s son, an infant at the time of the “rash impertinence.” No historian today would admit Camden as a witness to parliamentary sentiments in the 1560s, and few would repeat him as Black did. But no one would write like Black, either. Hers the way to peace, theirs to chaos? Goodness, such talk!

The Reign of Elizabeth may tell a story about bygone Englands, the queen’s and the author’s both, but the writing is still very fine.

***

In the current issue of The Nation (September 30) Akiva Gottlieb writes so beguilingly about Steven Soderbergh’s film-making that I was induced to watch a very disturbing movie, The Girlfriend Experience. Made in 2009, the movie has a reputation for being “experimental.” Its relation to chronology is certainly experimental — just how wildly out of sequence can scenes be presented without reducing the project to incoherence. I was not able to follow the story line, which doesn’t seem to be what interested Soderbergh or his writers. What happens is not as arresting as what simply is — Sasha Grey’s face. Grey is apparently playing a slightly modified version of herself; a porn queen in real life, she becomes an escort in the movie. Roger Ebert put it bluntly: Grey “has a disconnect between herself and what she does for a living. So does Chelsea.” That disconnect is what the movie is about. It has no story; it’s just there.

So far as looks go, Grey reminded me of a Demi Moore whose face had been replaned along Keira Knightley lines. It is a face that is composed rather than expressive. Whether it was a matter of makeup or not, I couldn’t tell, but Grey’s eyes don’t seem to open wide enough for dramatic work; she seems mildly sedated. This, I can well imagine, might not be a disadvantage in her regular work, but it will probably prevent her from breaking into A-list movies. At the same time, it served as an embodiment of the disconnect.

The disconnect breaks down at one point: all the circuits are firing together, and the result is tears. The tears are minimal, almost notional, but they crumple the mask and signal despair. Christine/Chelsea, the escort played by Grey, visits the hotel room of a man who might have been a client but who failed to show up at a weekend tryst. (Not to worry: the room was paid for.) She doesn’t berate him about this, but instead complains about the terrible review that she has been given at a Web site that rates escorts. Having seen the preliminaries of Christine’s meeting with this douchebag (too nice a word), you’re not surprised that she might not have been at her best when presenting him with “review copy,” but you’re appalled that she fell for his act. The guy is a middle-aged dork working out the back of a furniture warehouse in Queens — and promising lucrative trips to Dubai, if you please. Such a guy gets to review escorts? What was she thinking? It reminds one of the Gilgo Beach murders. The Internet has made it easy for reasonably attractive women to go into certain lines of business, but it has also exposed them to certain kinds of risks.

Although The Girlfriend Experience has a chic, well-kept surface, it is full of ugliness. Not the ugliness of pornography; there’s very little carnal contact in this film. But the clients are ugly. It’s not just that they’re ordinary-looking men who aren’t always in the best shape, but that they’re also horribly satisfied by the escort’s pretense. They don’t care how she really feels; they’re hoping, possibly, that she’s not feeling anything, because she’s too busy tending to them. The escort experience is that women are inherently less human than men. Do any men really believe this? Some of them certainly talk as though they do, when women aren’t around,  and, with an escort, they can act as though they believe it. The escort’s complicity is no less distressing.

And all anybody talks about is investing. It’s 2009, and the gravy train is slowing down. This is cutting into Christine’s business; it explains her visit to Queens. Her clients are obsessed by uncertainty: how much more will they lose? How much less will they take?

In several scenes, Christine is having a meeting over lunch. She actually eats. Of course she eats, she’s a human being, she has to eat. But it’s surprising. When she becomes Chelsea, she doesn’t have any needs at all.

When I was spending a lot of time at our house in Connecticut, I usually wore flannel shirts from Bean’s. They were all-cotton, but they were functionally wash-and-wear as well, at least for country purposes. When we gave up the house, I gave up the shirts, too; they didn’t seem right for town. That was nearly fifteen years ago.

Just before our first vacation on Fire Island, I bought a few seersucker shirts from Bean’s. They, too, were all-cotton wash-and-wear. This year, however, I continued wearing them back at home. If I were running an errand farther than Fairway or Duane Reade, I’d probably change into something a bit less rumply, just as I should replace shorts with trousers. But, just as on Fire Island, I tossed the shirts into the laundry and hung them up in the closet. I didn’t send them downstairs to be pressed and boxed, as I do with all my other shirts.

The other day, as the weather got chilly, I ordered three flannel shirts from Bean’s, to be worn and cared for according to the same rubric. Two of the plaids are new, but I had to have my old favorite, Black Watch.

There is a big picture here, even if the details aren’t very impressive.

What do you wear at home when nobody’s looking? A T-shirt, probably. But I’m too big for T-shirts, and, even if I weren’t, I come from a background in which T-shirts were, irredeemably, undergarments. I would no more walk around in boxers or briefs. For a long time, I wore polo shirts, but their superiority to T-shirts is more formal than real. And they’re usually monotone. No matter how appealing the color, there’s too much of it when I don the shirt. So I’m more comfortable in collared cotton plaid. When nobody’s looking, that is. When nobody’s looking, I’m still looking. And, besides, I want to be able to run downstairs for the mail or to pop over to Fairway without feeling like a slob. (A crazy person wearing shorts in January, maybe, but not a slob.)

The important thing is to be dressed for an errand to Fairway. Why Fairway? Because that’s the default food market now, and I try to buy no more than I need for the next meal or two. So the odds are that I’ll be going to Fairway at some point during the day. Fairway also sells sandwiches and salads that are sometimes just the thing that I’d like to have for lunch.

I learned the importance of being Fairway-ready after much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Here is what used to happen (until practically yesterday): I would drift from reading the Times to writing the blog entry. By the time I’d proofed the entry and stopped fiddling with the commas, it would be around noon, and I’d be starving. Starving. I’d be too hungry to think about what to do for lunch, and, on top of that, I’d still be wearing my sleeping outfit (write for details). If I didn’t want to fix lunch myself, or have something delivered, I’d have to get dressed and then go out — where? Too many decisions! So I learned to get dressed as soon as I’d made the bed, which I always do as soon as Kathleen leaves for work, if not before.

“Getting dressed” means taking a shower and putting on real clothes. It is the final, and for that reason the most difficult, stage of  getting out of bed. (Even if the bed has been made!) I learned that I must get dressed before writing. It really didn’t matter what I wore, just so long as I could wear it to Fairway or Duane Reade. If I later decided to go to a restaurant for lunch, I might change clothes, but that is not “getting dressed.” Getting dressed demands no more than clothing a clean body in presentable but comfortable togs. We each have our own idea of what that might be. The father of one of Kathleen’s oldest school friends continues to wear a suit-and-tie when at home. Every day. When nobody’s looking, he’s looking.

I ask myself: how can you be sixty-five years old, having worked at home for twenty-five of them, and yet just be working out the mechanics of your morning toilette? And where do you get the idea that anybody cares about your wardrobe problems?

***

When, instead, I ought to be writing about the grand textile show at the Museum. Or about two movies that I’ve just seen on DVD and that, because they’re both set in downtown Manhattan, I’ve mixed up in memory: perhaps What Maisie Knew and 2 Days in New York aren’t so different after all. One is very funny — sidesplitting, really, once it gets going (this would be the Julie Delpy) — while the other is so not. In What Maisie Knew, everything that would make you giggle or roll your eyes in 2 Days in New York makes you wince instead, and perhaps cry. I am going to add 2 Days in New York to my library; I don’t know yet about Maisie.

Interwoven Globe: The Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500-1800 is astonishingly alluring, but why? I can’t decide how to parse the question, much less figure out an answer. Is it astonishing that the show is alluring? Or is it astonishing that the allure is astonishing? After all, it’s just a collection of old pieces of fabric — generally very large pieces — with a few dresses thrown in. Is it art, even?

From the dark side comes a cynical suggestion: the exhibition galleries resemble an unimaginably posh department store — perhaps even a jewelry store. The first thing that hits you about these hangings is that they are priceless. Only a moron could fail to be dizzied by the intricately-detailed workmanship on display in vitrine after vitrine. Only someone utterly unfamiliar with luxury goods could fail to be staggered by the opulence gathered here. To make the emporium perfect, nothing is for sale. You needn’t worry whether you can afford to buy the things that you like, or about what you would do with them if you could take them home. The show is a perfect orgy of virtual consumption.

Less bleak, but no more artistic, is the observation that Interwoven Globe presents a brilliant chapter in the history of commerce. Indian textiles produced for the Thai market; Chinese goods produced for the European market; European goods designed to look as though they came from India or China. Palampores — bedspreads featuring a tree-of-life motif — purchased by Yankee merchants and preserved by generations of descendants in quiet attics. A picture of global trade quite different from the one with which we are familiar unfolds in room after room. Quite, but not entirely, different: we learn that red-backed palampores weren’t selling in London in the Seventeenth Century, so that the managers of the East India Company directed their agents to demand blankets with lighter backgrounds, and with the trees in the center, not around the border.

But one item, at least, stands out clearly as an artwork by any definition. It’s a palampore from Coromandel, made in the Eighteenth Century and currently in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. It is simply too beautiful not to be a work of art. Unfortunately, it must be seen in the weave, as it were; and, even then, not much of it can be examined closely. It brings to my mind the magisterial theme-and-variations pieces that Bach, Beethoven and Brahms composed, with a glorious concluding fugue at the center. There is no real repetition from one leaf to the next, and the flowers bloom in an imaginative profusion worthy of paradise.

I’ve seen the show twice already, and I’ll be back for more.

As I wrote yesterday, I was surprised by Diarmaid MacCulloch’s acknowledgment of his homosexuality, in the Introduction to his new book, Silence: A Christian History. It was a complex surprise, registering at several levels and in different connections. At the heart of the surprise, I suppose, is my age: I have lived from one era into another. So, I daresay, has MacCulloch, which also may explain why he makes the acknowledgment in this particular book.

The news that MacCulloch is gay is not the surprise. That kind of news is no news at all. But of course I can remember when it would have been — not just news, but shocking news. If the acknowledgment were made in print at all, it would be in connection with an arrest, or some other unsavory brush with the law. When I read the acknowledgment now, my response is duplex and wildly inconsistent: So what? layered over Oh, no! — dismay, not about the sexuality, but about the embarrassing legal tangle, with its train of broken marriage, lost job, social shunning, and so on.

In those days, the statement, “I am homosexual” was tantamount to “Now that I have confessed that, I am a likely suicide.” But today, as I say, it is no news at all. It means — what? It refers to the most preliminary of healthy sexual inclinations,  an attraction to one gender or the other; there are only two. The information inherent in the statement is largely vestigial, the echo of a bygone time (let us hope). Sexual preference, a formerly fraught distinction, has become almost empty of significance.

It used to seem to be information-rich, because persecution created a vibrant ghetto. A homosexual man was unlikely to enjoy stable relationships, but on the contrary doomed to seek out sexual encounters in sordid locales. An interest in the arts was indicated, and a lack of interest in sports. In the closet hung colorful clothes. If this cliché described only a small subset of the actual gay population, the public was unaware of it; the prosecutors were content to have their likely suspects.

Come to think of it, the unlabeled profile of the straight man was almost as limited. It was not okay to have hookups or affairs. Strip joints and pornographic magazines were kept well out of sight, and purveyors of straight vice got raided, too. Straight men were married with kids, period. No wonder marriage was the lode of comic material that it was. Half the people in it were not in it by choice!

It’s very nice, I must say, to be alive in a time in which a man no longer says,  “I’m gay,” but says, instead, “My boyfriend and I…” or, now,  “My husband and I….” That’s as it should be. Which brings me back to MacCulloch’s acknowledgment. It is obviously pertinent to the subject of his book, which is why his mentioning it is not gratuitous. But it is historical information: I grew up gay, in that other world described in the foregoing paragraphs. MacCulloch isn’t saying anything about himself now. There is no mention of a boyfriend or a husband. That would, after all, not be pertinent to a book about Silence. But the bald acknowledgment of a same-sex preference has become almost as unusual as it was when it was shocking. When it was shocking, implications bristled. Now, because they don’t, we feel puzzled: so what?

MacCulloch doesn’t leave us entirely in the dark. He goes on to assure us that he has prospered.

I was lucky to be able to face up to this challenge early on, was able to live life as I wished, and have enjoyed life much more as a result, but this life-experience has left me alert to the ambiguities and multiple meanings of texts, and to the ambiguities and multiple meanings of the behaviour of people around me. I have become attuned to listening to silence and to finding within it the keys to understanding many situations, far beyond anything to do with sexuality. Particularly in the still half-hidden structures of gay sensibility, there are all sorts of means of disclosure and concealment, ways of encoding meaning and subverting the mainstream assumptions of society. As a gay child and teenager, I also effortlessly developed the historian’s other essential quality, a sense of distance: an observer status in the rituals constructed for a heterosexual society in a world in which reality was not quite like that. I did not need the jargon of post-modernism to teach me elementary survival strategies in this world of mirrors, just what Chesterton would have called common sense.

I shall not pretend to sound the depths of Diarmaid MacCulloch’s new book, Silence: A Christian History. I read it for two reasons. First, MacCulloch is a brilliant historian working in a field that, until recently, had no real history, that of Christianity. (We were expected to accept the Roman church’s just-so stories.) He writes wonderfully well and he puts things together. Silence also happens to be relatively brief. It is brief by any measure, at 240 pages, but it is especially brief when compared with MacCulloch’s magisterial histories of the Protestant Reformation and of Christianity and its Hebrew antecedents. No book can be altogether silent, without also being pointless, but Silence is a remarkable exercise in discretion.

My second reason was idle curiosity: his earlier books made me wonder what it is that MacCulloch believes. Believes in, in the way of creeds. I overlooked the possibility that, on this particular point, the title might be particularly meaningful. It is, of course, none of our business, what MacCulloch’s credo happens to be. He is happy to tell us right off, however, that a lot of his thinking about silence has been shaped by the fact that “from an early age, I was conscious of being gay.” I wasn’t expecting to read that. This revelation worked, surprisingly, to intensify my sense of MacCulloch’s respect for his subject.

The structure of the book reminds me of Brahms’s Fourth Symphony. The arrangement of the first three parts, on silence in Scripture, in monastic life, and in the three reformations that MacCulloch finds in Christian history (iconoclasm, clerical centralism, and then the Protestant one), is slightly unusual, but nothing about them prepares you for the finale, which is a consideration of surreptitious silence — the silence of simulation. Sometimes, such silence is not only prudent but enriching: it is the silence of the conversos in Inquisitorial Spain. (MacCulloch’s subchapter on English Nicodemism under Elizabeth I is searingly intelligent, explaining most of the theological and institutional murk that was carefully propagated by that monarch in order to prevent a reprise of the violence that characterized preceding reigns — and that erupted after her demise. “Nicodemism” is one of Calvin’s coinages; it refers to an apostle who visited Jesus only at night.) Sometimes, silence is a disgrace, and in discussing three examples of shameful Christian silence — on sexual predation (he explores a forgotten but lamentably typical scandal from the Seventeenth Century), on the Holocaust, and on slavery — MacCulloch might be thought to be writing a kind of church history rather different from that in his earlier sections. But this is not the case, because the apophatic silence of negative theology, which holds that God is beyond human description, cannot be fully appreciated without taking the measure of the more interested, more human silence of cowardly non-witness.

Humble silence has two saliences. One is existential, and concerns the struggle of meaning against noise. The other is a function of authority. Historically, powerful men (and women) have been easily disposed to silence views alternative to their own. When this silencing is brought to bear on matters of faith, the virtuousness of obedience comes into question. Both aspects are brought together in the response of silence to assertions of orthodoxy — a response that may not be as passive as authorities might like to think. MacCulloch presses silence not for theories or principles but for implicit wisdom. I’m hardly surprised that the bit of wisdom that most quickly pierced my hide had to do with music.

Anglicans have good reason to point complacently to their development and protection of Choral Evensong, in cathedrals after the Reformation. Thomas Cramner’s Prayer Book service, put to musical uses of which he would undoubtedly have disapproved, has become one of the principal present-day vehicles of devotion for many who cannot accept forms of words which contain the orthodox propositions of Christianity; such attenders may still discover and explore their Christian identity through music, and in fact they have been attending the Anglican cathedrals and greater churches of England in ever larger numbers through the first decade of this century.

Silence is a book to keep close to hand.

It must be Friday the Thirteenth — that’s why I can’t find Emerson on the shelf. I must have put it in storage. It was a very fat Everyman’s Library volume, and I never opened it. It was something that I ought to have on hand, I thought, as part of a decently-stocked library. That’s what I wanted, then: a decently-stocked library. But I don’t have the room for one. I can only house a library of books that I’m going to open at least once a year.

Emerson is, it turned out, not for me. He is said to have had many wonderful thoughts, but I can’t find them, because all I see when I try to read him is turgid prose. Take this, from early on in “Self-Reliance.”

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being. And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers, and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort, and advancing on Chaos and the Dark.

Why do I dislike this so? The metaphoric sprawl is distasteful, certainly. Great men confide themselves childlike but yet are not minors or invalids in protected corners. “Cowards fleeing before a revolution” — what the devil can that mean? Iron rings vibrate in hearts that are also the seats of the absolutely trustworthy — this is in serious danger of saying nothing. (Emerson is an emphatically unmusical writer, with no sense of rhythm or sound, so it’s not surprising that his harp is strung with a string of iron.) Obeying the Almighty effort — what? Advancing on Chaos and the Dark, even if it does suggest Freud’s project for the unconscious, blurs its sense in a cloud of vague grandiosity. Are we there yet?

I was thinking about Emerson because Mark Edmundson, whose book, Why Teach?, I was writing about yesterday, admires him so much. I wouldn’t say that there are too many quotations from Emerson in the book — only that the ones that there are made me feel that I was chewing on mouthfuls of incompletely baked potato.

Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

This is wrong, I think — as all social-contract thinking is wrong. Society, and the humanity that guides it, have emerged from primordial unconsciousness over tens of thousands of years. There never was a congress of venerable ancestors who deliberated our civil arrangements — not until the disastrous attempts to do so of modern times. We don’t really know enough about ourselves to design a society from the ground up. We do not actually prize conformity, we simply find it very, very convenient. As a man of his time, Emerson routinely opposed the great (creators) to the bourgeois (joint-stock company members), and he had no reservations about urging his readers to transcend the everyday in the pursuit of greatness. But we have since learned that, transcendence or not, the everyday cannot be escaped. Somebody has to do the laundry. And it’s easier for everybody if you do your laundry on Tuesday, and I do mine on Wednesday. (In Emerson’s day, the men never had to do the laundry at all, but we don’t live there anymore.)

Aside from being wrong, the aphorism is phrased in the strangest English — raw Chaucer makes more immediate sense. “Self-reliance is its aversion”? Who speaks like that? “Culture of the eater” is particularly bad: the first two names for the object of Emerson’s derision, members and shareholders, establish a parallel that the concluding phrase cognitively insults. But here we have precisely what’s wrong with American prose before Henry James. It is overwhelmed by the literature of 1600: Shakespeare and the King James Bible. American letters appear to have declared independence from the style of the Eighteenth Century — the earliest form of the language that can still be read without mental ructions — only to lapse into self-conscious archaism. Emerson particularly had a horror of writing clearly and straightforwardly, but his irregularities, intended to recapture the sacred aura that lighted English letters for a decade or two after the last of Elizabeth I, have no genius of their own; they are merely awkward revivals of a dead manner.

No, I should say that we are advancing from the Chaos and the Dark. If you want to call that a cowardly flight from revolution, suit yourself.

***

I learned something very valuable from Mark Edmundson, although I don’t believe that he intended to teach it. I learned that I don’t admire anybody. Almost anybody. I do admire my wife, my daughter and my son-in-law, and my old friend Fossil. And perhaps one or two others — all people whom I know very well, whom I have seen up close for years. I think I’m very fortunate to live among these admirable people, but the point that I want to make is that they are really the only people I know well enough to admire. For the rest, I admire what people do. I don’t admire who they are, because I don’t know who they are. And I’m not about to assume that, because they’ve done great things, they must be great themselves. Nor, by the same token, am I going to scold them when it turns out that these doers of great things, whom I don’t know personally, are not so great themselves.

Lest this sound thought out, I want to add that I learned from Mark Edmundson that I have never admired other people. I started out admiring nobody. And this was not a problem, because I don’t need to admire people. Edmundson made me suspect that this is unusual, or perhaps it was the conjunction of having written about faith, and that fact that I’ve never felt the need for that, either.

I admire completed things. Not just paintings, symphonies, and novels, but also the manner in which paintings, symphonies, and novels are presented. I do not confuse the complete with the eternal: anything can change. Most completed things come to an end eventually. (You could say that I admire the family and friends whom I’ve mentioned because my sense of them has attained a certain completeness.) But, while they last, you can get to know them, and try to understand them, and the impulse that inspires you to do so is admiration.

As such, my idea of admiration is incompatible with the notion and practice of hero-worship. It is also hostile to celebrity culture, which creates the illusion of familiarity with people who, all too often, haven’t completed anything.