Friday

Kathleen has just left. She’s going to spend the weekend with her father in Durham. She’ll be back on Sunday. My own plans for the weekend are simple: I’ll see a movie this afternoon and then sit with Will while his parents go out to dinner; and, tomorrow afternoon, I’ll have a look at the pre-dynastic installation in the Egyptian galleries at the Museum. I think that I’ll be able to manage that. It’s hard to think very clearly this morning. We had a thunderstorm, about an hour ago. For the third day, the sky is leaden and the air is neither wintry nor warm, but uncomfortably indifferent.

It’s a good weekend for digesting the altera pars of Alison Bechdel, Are You My Mother? I’ve just pulled down Fun Home, the “family tragicomic” that came out, astonishingly, six years ago (that long!). It’s shorter, it’s more roughly drawn, and it’s a much simpler, more straightforward read — as would befit comparisons between a book about a father and a book about a mother. Most of yesterday afternoon went to Are You My Mother? I read it in about three sittings, almost breathlessly, trying to keep track of the constantly-shifting time frame and to absorb all the ideas of Donald Winnicott that serve as a kind of ground-bass to the story. Then I got to the last box. “She has given me the way out.” I felt a shocking discharge; the tears popped out of my eyes and I gasped for breath. There was nothing intrinsically surprising about this last line; it simply culminated everything that went before. Everything. It was the way out of the book, too, of course: “this way to the egress.”

The Bechdel family saga involves an openly homosexual daughter and a closeted homosexual father, but it doesn’t stop there. What, exactly, is the problem between Alison and her mother, Helen? Growing up, Alison found her mother to be distant, and as an adult she came to wish that her mother were more interested in her life — more prying, even. What wounds and dissatisfactions held Helen back? I don’t think that she will ever tell us; she’s on record in this book as holding memoir (as a literary form) in contempt. But perhaps there is no need for a memoir, if Helen can say, in one memorable outburst, “I regret that I wasn’t Helen Vendler.” What doesn’t that tell us?

I came away from the first reading persuaded that mother and daughter were literary rivals in much the same way that a father and a son might be, and that the mother quite beautifully managed her side of the rivalry by staying out of her daughter’s way. Bad mothering, perhaps (inadequate, certainly), but, as the book says at the end, “the way out.” The mother-daughter connection, qua female, was something of a red herring, particularly as the two women never competed sexually. There was a hole in Alison’s infancy — when she was about three months old, her mother became pregnant again, and Helen always made more of her two boys — and much of Are You My Mother? is an analysis — a psychoanalysis — of that gap and how the adult Bechdel dealt with it. The book is so good — The Pain Recaptured would have made a good title — that it is easy to overlook the obvious: mother and daughter were (are) both serious writers. Helen Bechdel isn’t Helen Vendler, and Alison Bechdel tells stories graphically, but they are still, both of them,  intellectual hunters after truth. I don’t know anything about the brothers, but the evidence suggests that Helen and Alison are the men in the family. 

***

Among my more egregious sins, lately, I’ve been failing to write up the movies that I see. The Five-Year Engagement is a marvelous picture that deserves nothing less than hosannas; perhaps I’ll get to it on Sunday. Perhaps I’ll see it again, in the theatres, with Kathleen (not very likely before our trip to Amsterdam, though). Today, I saw a film that elicited a very different response, but as it won’t take long to state it I’ll jump in even though it’s nearly ten and I’ve just had a good time with Will, if you know what I mean. (Which you don’t unless you’re my age. He was an angel, but he did order me around a bit.) I think that it’s better to write about Damsels in Distress late in the evening than early in the morning, when I have more energy.

I was disappointed, first by the production values and then by the story, such as it was. I’m all for making movies on the cheap, but I’m not a fan of cheap-looking movies, and there were moments in Damsels that reminded me of the educational filmstrips that we used to have sit through in Sixties auditoriums. The visuals were not crisp and the sound took some getting used to. It was a long, long way from Barcelona.

The story makes sense only as an undergraduate project. If Whit Stillman were to tell me that he’d pulled a scenario out of a college trunk, I’d have thought, exactly. The point of view was the kind of muddle that’s inevitable when you think (as some sophomores really do) that everything you do is très cool. It was almost, but not quite, a train wreck. Is Damsels a satire of upscale dimwits loitering in the Groves of Academe, or is it merely set there, like Too Many Girls and My Lucky Star? The entire dancing business, all of it, was strange at best and just wrong most of the time. (If only the Sambola had been a dance sensation!) And I was less and less sure about Greta Gerwig’s character as the movie progressed; by the end, I was thinking that Payne Whitney might be the place for her. There were lots of good things in the movie (Analeigh Tipton, Ryan Metcalf, and Megalyn Echikunwoke all deserved more time in the spotlight). But they didn’t cohere, so they couldn’t offset the terrible things in the movie (the Cathars! the Roman Holidays!). There were too many fizzled plotlines (it would have been better with no professors, and the whole Daily Complainer line was hardly more salvageable than the dancing), all of them more engaging than they would have been with a strong central plot.

The worst of it was this awful fear, that Whit Stillman never saw Mean Girls.

Nevertheless, I recommend Damsels in Distress, partly out of class loyalty (I’ll be honest) and partly out of class treason. I don’t know how I’m going to feel about it the second time around. There will be a second viewing; there almost always is. Question is: will there be a third?

Saturday

What a glorious evening I’ve just had. It’s my new model for a night out on the town. First of all: not a “night”; it’s not even ten, and here I am at the keyboard. The second thing is that I would have had an even better time if Kathleen had been with us, because then, of course, we could talk all night about everything that we learned.

At four o’clock, I met up with Marc LeBlanc, Ms NOLA’s brother, a very nice guy who also happens to be a credentialed Egyptologist (PhD Yale, 2011). He conducted me through the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s installation of pre-dynastic objects, at the bottom of the Lehman Wing. The fact that I had never given such objects much of a thought made the visit what we used to call “a trip.”

“Pre-dynastic,” it occurred to me on the walk home from dinner, is not the way to put it. “Ante-dynastic” is, as in “ante-bellum,” the phrase that used to denote life in the United States between Jackson and the Civil War. The culture of Egypt before unification under the pharoahs (Marc is rigorous about speaking of “kings”) was not erased by what came later; it was simply developed. Certain things were dropped, such as the “bird dance,” or whatever it was that was signified by the representation of a female profile (none too hippy or busty, by the bye) raising her arms over her head in a heart-shaped manner, fingers pointing down. Some scholars believe that the gesture is meant to suggest the horns of a heifer, but Marc is not persuaded by this theory; he thinks that a bird is the object of imitation. I was inclined to agree, but the uncertainty is not without its appeal. There is always much to be learned.

Other things, such as boats, became fixtures of Egyptness. Also, palm trees and chorus lines of ostriches. (Well, chorus lines.) The objects at the Museum begin by looking generically “archeological”; hippopotamuses (all of whom look pretty much like Tiger in Kipper) are the only Egyptian cue. Then human figures appear. A few cases on, and you get to the palettes. The palettes are ceremonial inkstones, as it were, for the preparation of ceremonial makeup; the working center of each palette is a perfectly rimmed circle in which the cosmetics were ground. I think that we’re talking about make-up for men here: men for whom the difference between hunting, religion, and warfare did not exist. I hope to write more about the palettes after further visits; I’ve never seen anything like them, and they are not only fascinating but brilliantly executed. Marc can’t have imagined how far I was from being bored by his explication. If I slowed down now and then, it was only because I was soaking everything up. I saw serekhs everywhere, especially before I knew how to spell them. (A serekh is the royal insignia, inscribed in a square and topped by a falcon. Literally, the square part of a serekh is the wall of a king’s palace.) I was more disappointed by the end of new things to look at than I have ever been in my life. I was just getting started!

So I asked Marc to take me through the Egyptian Wing itself, the part of the Museum that I know least well. I’m glad that I’d waited for this particular guided tour, because it was as though someone (namely Marc) were saying, “And all of this is just down the street from your house, too.” Here’s one great thing that I learned. By the time of Rameses II (I’m spelling it the old way, I think), the ancient Egypt that I’d discovered at the pre-dynastic show was already ancient Egypt! It was already thousands of years old, more or less, and ripe for rediscovery and retooling. Retooling? We’ll talk about Amenhotep III’s Colonial Williamsburg ball some other time. In the Great Hall of the Museum, right in front of the Membership desk, there stands a great granitic statue of Amenemhat II (1929-1895 BCE), from Berlin. Thing is, the cartouches — the rounded lozenges in which the king’s name is inscribed — say “Ramses II.” And why not, Rameses, or Ramesses, okay (watch out, or I’ll call him “Ramsay”), was a Very Great King (1303-1213) in whom I have always had a close interest, because, like me, he suffered from ankylosing spondylitis — even if Wikipedia says he didn’t. But forget about that; the point is that, even in Egypt, nothing was sacred. I joshed with Marc about it. I said that the reinscription may have been effected without royal directive. Maybe Ramesses was on a tour, and the good folks in Thebes wanted to welcome him warmly. “What have we got?” said the mayor to his minions. I realize that this is sounding more Preston Sturges than Dio Cassio. But I will tell you this. By the time we got to the statue in the Great Hall, I would have recognized Ramses’s cartouche anywhere. (And it is all over Amenemhat, the poor sod.)

We were on the point of leaving the Museum for dinner when I asked Marc if there was anything that he wanted to see. The upshot of that was that we went up to the Irving Galleries in the Asia Wing, which are more often closed than not. I wished that I could have told him more about the luohans, but we liked them well enough without my blather.

After that, we had a good dinner at Demarchelier — after which it was great to walk outside into the cool evening. Marc persuaded me (without trying) that I really have to see The Wire. Walking down 86th Street in the middle of the Saturday night, I felt that I was having as great a time as anybody. And I still do, except that now I’ve done the writing and must be prepared for the edits. Better edits than smitings!

Sunday

Last Saturday, when I headed downtown for Ray Soleil’s party, I left Kathleen in bed, weeding through her emails. I also left a playlist running. The next day, she told me what a pleasure it had been to listen the music through the afternoon and into the evening — it stopped only shortly before I came home. I could not have been more pleased. I had compiled the playlist for weekend lazing, which is to say with a firm awareness of what Kathleen would like to listen to and what she wouldn’t, and it was great to know that I had accomplished just that. She thanked me, which was the most unlooked-for pleasure. Not Kathleen’s thanking me, but thanking me for the music.

Compiling another playlist this afternoon (this one built around Handel’s two sets of keyboard suites) I’m remembering how awful it used to be —I used to be — when I’d play records for friends. “Oh, you must hear this.” “Wait, there’s something else that you’ve just got to hear!” “This will only take a second; it’s very short.” “I thought it was this cut; it must be the next one.” How good people were, on the whole, to put up with such torture. Now, I’m absolutely mystified by the need that I had to make other people hear the music that I happened to be crazy about. I have lost the urge to “share.” And I don’t “play records” anymore. I can’t underline sharply enough how the act of listening to music at home has been transformed by these vast iTunes playlists that I’ve been putting together for five years.

***

Having stayed up late last night — I watched the outstanding Charlize Theron in Young Adult, and would have perished of sympathetic mortification if I hadn’t been too tired for strong feelings — I slept in this morning, getting up at ten, breakfasting at half-past noon, and getting dressed quite indecently late. After spending a few hours with the Times, I picked up The Turn of the Screw and read as much as I could before the pot of rich, dark coffee that I’d drunk made it impossible to continue. Kathleen flies home this evening; she’ll have had an early dinner with her father and brother before boarding the plane. I’m thinking of watching a movie that I’ve never heard of.

***

And the question is, why haven’t, or hadn’t, I heard of Stephen Poliakoff’s Glorious 39? Or, for the matter of that, Stephen Poliakoff? He seems to be a one-man TV industry in Britain, and Glorious 39 is the sort of movie that you’d expect American Anglophiles to gobble right up. Imagine: Brideshead Revisited meets Remains of the Day, with a dash of Atonement. The cast includes Julie Christie and Bill Nighy, also Jeremy Northam, Eddie Redmayne, and Juno Temple. Romola Garai is the star. She plays the adopted daughter of a very grand family, from which she is cut apart by the discovery of its participation in an aristocratic attempt to steer the UK toward surrender to Hitler — a conspiracy that is not shy of murder. I forgot Notorious — there’s more of a dash of that in Glorious 39. Hitchcock is definitely in the air. (I also forgot to mention Hugh Bonneville, who, with Charlie Cox, is one of at least two Downton Abbey stars on hand.) Melodramatic and gorgeous at the same time, Glorious 39 is perhaps a tad sententious, but it kept me on the edge of my seat just the same. When I ordered it, from Amazuke, I prepared myself for something awful, because otherwise there’s no explaining why the picture wasn’t shown and isn’t known over here. Or perhaps I’ve just had another one of my senior moments, and everyone knows all about it.  

There isn’t anything particularly new in the “Ego Depletion” entry at You Are Not So Smart — not for anyone who knows how to spell “Tierney” — but these are early days in the Cognitive Revolution, and it’s going to take a while for the gyre of tests and studies to gel into a popular program, or at any rate a program popular among literate folk. And David McRaney wraps up the entry on a lyrical note that captures the affect as well as the effects of will-power exhaustion.

Modern life requires more self control than ever. Just knowing Reddit is out there beckoning your browser, or your iPad is waiting for your caress, or your smart phone is full of status updates, requires a level of impulse control unique to the human mind. Each abstained vagary strengthens the pull of the next. Remember too that you can dampen your executive functions in many ways, like by staying up all night for a few days, or downing a few alcoholic beverages, or holding your tongue at a family gathering, or resisting the pleas of a child for the umpteenth time. Having an important job can lead to decision fatigue which may lead to ego depletion simply because big decisions require lots of energy, literally, and when you slump you go passive. A long day of dealing with bullshit often leads to an evening of no-decision television in which you don’t even feel like switching the channel to get Kim Kardashian’s face out of your television, or sitting and watching a censored Jurassic Park between commercials even though you own a copy of the movie five feet away.

This passage is embedded in a paragraph that begins and ends with admonishments to plan ahead. I think that that’s what I’ve been trying to do since my time on Fire Island last summer, and that that’s why life has felt so different and, paradoxically (?), so fatiguing ever since. Planning ahead means understanding your life in very fine detail — your routines, your environment, and so on — so that you can manipulate your course through them. Acquiring this understanding demands an entirely new set of demands upon your attention, and a new range of decisions, all of which are depleting. (Is this why it’s so hard to make serious changes? Does this explain “force of habit”?) It’s only when you’ve made the set of correct decisions about reorganizing your life that you can proceed to live that reorganized life — if you still have any energy.

This came to me this morning when, before getting up, I mulled over the title of yesterday’s entry, which I never changed even though I also never got round to giving it a raison d’être in the entry. What was on my mind, early yesterday morning, was that it has been a very long time since I popped out of bed, eager for the new day. (For breakfast, at a minimum.) I’ve attributed this lack of zip to age, and to the fatigue that increases with age (for some people), and of course to drinking too much wine, even though I now go to bed, night after night, with a perfectly clear head. This morning, it occurred to me that there might be something else at work. Out on Fire Island last summer, I had a “torso of Apollo” moment, in which I not only knew that I must change my life but saw the direction in which I must change it. And that is what I have been doing ever since, day after day — either changing my life or collapsing from the task. All the while, of course, I’ve been living my regular life — writing here, reading endless feeds, keeping house, washing up after dinner, and to some extent looking after Kathleen. You’ll say: well, what changed? All those things. I do almost everything a little bit differently, and the changes were all made with a view to conserving my will power. Whatever could be turned into an easy, unthinking habit, was. That’s probably not what Rilke had in mind, but he wasn’t living in the Cognitive Revolution. Changing your life nowadays is a matter of coding. 

***

When we were young, we Boomers, we were told that we could be anything, do anything. Our opportunities were said to be boundless. I suspect that the more affluent among us — those who grew up to assume an inordinate number of positions of power — heard the message incessantly. Of course, it was wrong; we were misinformed. We were brought up on bad information. It’s no wonder that we thought that we had all the time in the world, or that we would be allowed to slough off the consequences of our mistakes and start again. That we saw the error in this outlook is attested by the tendency that we and succeeding generations have followed toward overprogramming the lives of our children.   

Finished off by the Museum yesterday afternoon, I was good for nothing but watching movies at home. Happily, something new arrived in the (Royal) mail, a DVD of Andrew Haigh’s Weekend. I didn’t know anything about this film until I read a snatch of what Wesley Morris had to say about it (in the Globe, I presume); Wesley Morris, the fourth film critic to win a Pulitzer ever, was hailed by Jim Emerson at Scanners; I’d never heard of Morris, either. When Weekend was over, I watched Runaway Jury. I’d been tempted to watch it whilst cleaning the refrigerator on Monday afternoon, but I hadn’t been up for the grim opening sequence, in which a disaffected day-trader (remember them?) goes haywire and takes a rifle to his brokerage office. I wasn’t up for that yesterday, either; I contrived to be in the kitchen making dinner for most of it.

Weekend is such a delicate picture that synopsis can only mislead. Wesley Morris writes,

Sometimes you don’t want to escape. You want to connect with a movie that’s really about something, to listen to a filmmaker talk things out, to watch him amp everyday life without calling attention to his turning up the sound.

And what Weekend is about is, again in Morris’s words, “the way intimacy compounds sex until it begins to sprout feelings.” It is not about this-happened-then-that. Of course things have to happen: on a Friday night, a lifeguard and an artist meet in a gay bar and go back to the lifeguard’s apartment; on the following Sunday afternoon, the artist leaves Nottingham for Portland, Oregon and a two-year course, and the two men, who are now lovers, are as heartbroken as if they’d known each other for years. Weekend is, indeed, about the sprouting of feelings, and Andrew Haigh is a magician, because the sprouting of anything is pretty slow watching, and yet Weekend is never boring. He knows how to keep his material fresh. He perches Russell, for example, in a fourteenth-floor flat in what seems to be a well-maintained council estate. This allows for several interesting variations on the theme of his new friend’s several departures, seen walking away along an angular path from the high distance of Russell’s window.

Then there is the brilliance of excising the entire one-night-stand experience that brings the men together. We realize, with the dawn of the morning-after, that the foregoing scenes have been by way of introduction, and that the movie is starting now, when Glen pulls out a voice recorder and solicits Russell’s assessment of the sex that they’ve had, “for an art project,” he says. Russell is immediately put off, and before you know it, he and Glen have had their first fight, without raising their voices. Glen, the artist, is a sharp-tongued connoisseur of the self-hatreds of gay life; Russell, more cautious in every way (he is a lifeguard), thinks that it’s right to want to be happy. As the two men realize that they really click, Glen becomes distraught: he grasps Russell’s arms and says, “I don’t do [being] boyfriends, and I don’t want us to fall out about it.” Which is to say, I want us to be friends about not being friends. It’s impossible of course, just as the prospect of maintaining any kind of relationship for two years across thousands of miles is impossible. But Weekend,  gloriously, is not about problem-solving. As for the sex, Haigh has a genius for highlighting surrender, which registers in heads and shoulders as well as it does in any other parts of the body. His discretion is never coy.

Tom Cullen (Russell) and Chris New (Glen), appearing in their first feature, have the look of indie amateur innocents that a movie like Weekend needs; I can’t imagine how the film will read when the actors’ faces become familiar, as I’ve no doubt that they will, from other projects. That alone is a great reason to get hold of Weekend now.     

Runaway Jury, which I watched quite a number of times when the DVD came out, feels older than it is, possibly because it was shot in New Orleans before Katrina. Like Fracture, which is the movie that I did watch whilst cleaning the refrigerator, it is a game of cat-and-mouse that uses the law for tokens in much the way that Monopoly uses battleships and steam irons. This would be objectionable if the movie weren’t so fast-paced that it can dispense with absolute coherence. At the very end, the characters played by John Cusack and Rachel Weisz are presented as the Good Guys, but their justice is a little rough and certainly not legal. You forgive this, because, good or not, they whip the dickens out of Gene Hackman, whose Bad Guy status is certified from the beginning. As a “jury consultant” who will stop at nothing, not even suborning jurors, to win a favorable verdict for his clients, his Rankin Fitch flies an enemy-of-democracy flag that must have been picked up at a Cold-War souvenir shop, and Mr Hackman invests him with all the gleeful malevolence of a Bond villain. Unlike a Bond villain, however, he does not perish invisibly in the explosion of his bunker. No, he is reduced to wobbling sobs at a rundown bar, his career (and life) in utter ruins — and he’s still alive!

It’s also fun to watch Jeremy Piven before.

***

 

“Nevertheless,” Kathleen said, “and in spite of everything, I still do love you.” Not forty seconds ago she said this, concluding a discussion of last night’s late hours. I argued that she was a wicked enchantress who would stop at nothing to raise topics of interest in the wee hours; never mind what she claimed. I do know that it was not I who began, at midnight, to tabulate the locations of all the Vermeers in the world. On the other hand, it was I who brought out the London A-Z to establish where, exactly, St Pancras Station stands in relation to everything else. (Far from, just as I thought.) Don’t be surprised when I confess that we slept through our flight to Heathrow.

I want to see The Mousetrap, with an unidentified cast. The show has been running since the year before Kathleen was born — how bad can it be? Kathleen wants to see Hay Fever, with Lindsay Duncan and Jeremy Northam. So do I, but not so much. The idea of seeing Hay Fever in the West End reminds me of seeing Deborah Carr as Candida in 1977, which I actually did. It is possible to be too authentic.

Now I am off to the Museum, for a Far Corners tour of the Wing That Used to be Islamic and the wing that is still American. First, my old law school classmate and I will have lunch — her treat. When she complained about my paying for brunch on Sunday, I laughed and allowed that I would let her take me to the cafeteria at the Museum. Upon reflection, I became more generous, and arranged to meet at the Petrie Court.  

***

Wherever the Vermeers are, they’re not where they belong. The Sleeping Maid is hanging more or less in the right place, but the other four are AWOL. Serves me right.

¶ At Gene Expression, Razib Khan comments on Jonathan Haidt, whose book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, is just about the most interesting thing that we’ve read in the past year. (4/3)

Finally there’s the point about human flourishing, and Haidt’s contention that conservative political and social philosophy has a lot of insight in fostering human happiness. I agree with Haidt broadly on this. That’s why I’m a conservative. But a key point I want to inject here is that I personally am not the type of person who flourishes in a conservative society. I’m too individualistic, egotistic, and lacking in the depth of moral sentiments which are the human norm (I am a natural libertarian). This is why another important insight is that societies need internal structure and genuine diversity of niche, so that people with different lifestyles can flourish. There does need to be a Castro district in San Francisco, but there also needs to be conservative small towns which are relatively homogeneous in population and values.

¶ Maria Popova praises Stuart Firestein’s Ignorance: How It Drives Science, and does a dandy job of placing the book in the burgeoning field of wrongology. (Brain Pickings; 4/3) ¶ Jason Kottke considers Instagram and Facebook as “company towns.” (kottke.org) ¶ Why, Felix Salmon thinks, the $1 billion purchase of the former by the latter makes sense: “Think of it as a $1 billion way to make your parents’ status updates more interesting.” ¶ Why belle-époque Vienna still matters: Jonah Lehrer interviews Nobelist Eric Kandel, author of The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind and Brain: From Vienna 1900 to the Present. (Frontal Cortex; 4/13)

¶ “What if Schools Weren’t Schools Anymore,” asks Liz Dwyer, reporting on an inquiry into education reform the reminds us of the Editor’s crackpot scheme. (GOOD) ¶ The poor design of the Retreat at Twin Lakes, the “gated community” in which George Zimmerman shot Trayvon Martin, confused essentially public roads with private driveways, making a trespasser, Zach Youngerman writes, out of almost any pedestrian. (Boston Globe; via Things; 4/18)

¶ Timothy Garton Ash explains why the major powers’ preoccupations elsewhere are working to a resurgent Turkey’s advantage. Questions for Syrians: to be Arabs in an Ottoman world again? (Globe and Mail; via Real Clear World; 4/13) ¶ Kaya Genç tells us why conservative backbiters created the plagiarism scandal out of thin air when Elif Shafak’s new novel, Honour, proved to be a hit. (LRB; 4/18) ¶ The interesting takeaway from Nicholas Burns’s Turkey-as-superpower piece is the argument that President Obama is playing a very smart game. (Globe; via Real Clear World; 4/30)

¶ Tadas Viskanta joins Joshua Brown in calling for more financial blog entries about the problems faced by ordinary investors.He notes that “by and large the finance and investment blogosphere exists apart from the everyday needs of most savers.” (Abnormal Returns; 4/3) ¶ Matt Stoller lists three things that progressive Democrats will have to learn how to do in order to beat back the neoliberal juggernaut: Get the voters to turn out in primaries; deliver goods (information, mostly) along with the arguments; and remount the neglected “radical” issues. (Naked Capitalism; 4/13) ¶ Blake Masters’s notes on Peter Thiel’s Startup 101 lectures will teach you a great deal about good business thinking, but we cite the piece because we agree with Mr Thiel’s first principle: “A startup messed up at its foundation cannont be fixed.” His example? Regarding the US Senate’s unrepresentative constitution, he writes, “Some say that’s a feature, not a bug. Whatever it is, we’re likely to be stuck with it for as long as this country exists.” Can we please have a real American Revolution? (via The Browser; 4/30)

¶ Peter Dinklage built a career on never playing leprechauns. And he doesn’t like “lucky” (NYT; 4/3):

Saying I was lucky negates the hard work I put in and spits on that guy who’s freezing his ass off back in Brooklyn. So I won’t say I’m lucky. I’m fortunate enough to find or attract very talented people.

¶ Something about Whit Stillman’s interview with David Coggins, at A Continuous Lean, suggests that Mr Stillman himself would have to be played by Colin Firth. ¶ Iris Veysey writes about the power of Edith Head’s costume designs for Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. We always feel that Judy Barton’s clothes embody Scottie Ferguson’s ache for Madeleine Elster: he has to get rid of them. (Clothes on Film) ¶ We already knew this, and so did you, but Ben Fritz reminds us that movie trailers are evolving under serious pressure from the Internet, and movies along with them. (LA Times; via Arts Journal; 4/11) ¶ Josh Lieberman does his best to dust off the reputation of Orson Welles, which, if Google is any indication, is in pretty bad shape. (Splitsider) ¶ Jim Emerson shouts out Wesley Morris, a writer at the Globe who is only the fourth film critic to receive a Pulitzer Price. The entry includes generous extracts. Morris has his own voice and looks to be well worth following. (Scanners; 4/24)

¶ Levi Stahl wonders what we’d like if we had, or were, servants. Without literature, who would even think of such a question? (Ivebeenreadinglately; 4/13) ¶ Janet Potter lays down the rules — and now that she’s done so, everybody ought to know them — about introducing authors at bookstore readings. Basic rule: “Any synopsis you do give of the current book should be one sentence long.” Rule Nº 2: Don’t synopsize anything else. (The Millions; 4/30)

The literary life is famously short on pleasure, but it does equip its acolytes with tools for amusing others. Three cases in point: ¶ Rob Roberge remembers a particularly unsuccessful writing class that he was saddled with teaching; there were some good women in the class, but they were driven away by the two men, who ranged from creepy to creepier. (The Rumpus) ¶ Jim Behrle, who claims to be writing “on a blue Selectric II typewriter in a meadow filled with ducks” (he has “a very long extension cord”), unfurls a list of pitfalls to be avoided by would-be Roths: Brooklyn, Starbucks, adultery, &c. (The Awl). ¶ And the always edgy Jimmy Chen defends, sort of, his excellent infographic on modern literature. (HTMLGiant; 4/3)

I will not apologize for my non-inclusive list. This website’s width is 600 pixels, and I wanted the font to be legible, so you can imagine my constraints.

¶ Books that we loved when we were young but that make us wince now: Nadia Chaudhury polls a number of people familiar in the Blogosphere, but see if you can guess which writer Edmund White has outgrown. (The Awl; 4/5) ¶ Russell Smith agrees with the suggestion that we ventured the other day: How is Damien Hirst different from Thomas Kinkade? (Globe and Mail; via Arts Journal; 4/13) ¶ Brian Dillon’s catalogue essay on Damien Hirst places the artist in the Wunderkammer tradition. (Ruins of the 20th Century; 4/18) ¶ Two really good Rumpus interviews, with John Jeremiah Sullivan (“Yes, my whole interest in the early eighteenth century is a sublimated interest in the present.”) and Elif Batuman (“In a way, the Mike Daisey story was perfect for This American Life – except that this time they were victims of the hoax, which maybe interfered with how they covered it.”) Fab stuff. (4/30)

¶ Checking in at Wuthering Expectations, we found a raft of great entries, a few of them about the great Portuguese novelist, Eça de Queirós. “Modeling the Canon,” however, caught our fancy, with its demonstration that we can never know who the great writers are, because the readers of the future make it an open question. As if that weren’t bad enough, everyone has his or her own canon, and we’red quite unequally persuasive. (4/5) ¶ John Self’s write-up of Greg Baxter’s novel, The Apartment, is very appetizing. (Asylum; 4/13) ¶ Alizah Salario’s review of Leigh Stein’s The Fallback Plan is also an autobiographical fragment. (The Rumpus) ¶ “Very quickly these poor young men are reaching that critical juncture in life that decides everything, though they are heedless to this fact.” Kevin Nolan reviews Nescio (The Rumpus) ¶ We’re in no hurry for Maria Bustillos to make up her mind about Tom Bissell — no sooner does she scribble “v true” in the margin, than she hurls the book across the room. She makes us laugh! (LARB; via 3 Quarks Daily; 4/24)

¶ Helen DeWitt goes to Meeting (in Berlin) and silently applauds standing in silence. (Paperpools; 4/4) ¶ There are few surprises (for anyone familiar with the school) in Janet Reitman’s Rolling Stone story about Andrew Lohse, the Dartmouth undergrad who blew the whistle on his fraternity’s hazing rituals, and who may wind up the only man punished. (via The Morning News; 4/5) ¶ At The Rumpus, a collection of reader contributions on the conundrum of having sex without having a relationship: Friends with Benefits. (4/11)

¶ At The Age of Uncertainty, Steerforth looks back with fond regret on his dealings with publishers’ sales reps, even though as a rule they had no use for books as such. “When I left high-street bookselling, one of the things I really missed was having a good gossip with a rep.” (4/3) ¶ Levi Stahl reviews Emily Cockayne’s Cheek  by Jowl: A History of Neighbors, which seems to collect a great many grumbles from ages past. He reasonably concludes that the best way to avoid problems with the neighbors is to know them no better than strictly necessary. (I’ve Been Reading Lately; 4/4) ¶ We cite this Discover piece about Driverless Cars not because it’s astute but because it points to one of the gaping holes in American jurisprudence, the other being corporate-executive criminal library. Sometimes, don’t you know, the law has to be fundamentally updated. A government that controlled the roads on which driverless cars operated would also be the government that provided healthcare to occasional accidental victims: end of story. (4/30)

Have a Look:  ¶ Move over, Monet. Another stunning picture of water lilies at JRParis’s country retreat in Touraine. (Mnémoglyphes; 3/3) ¶ New from Rufus (with Helena Bonham Carter) @ Joe.My.God. ¶ Got a minue? Rear Window compressed @ kottke.org. (4/4) ¶ Fragments of a Gerard Hoffnung spoof interview, guaranteed to make you laugh unto weeping. (@ Nigeness; 4/5) ¶ Scouting NY tracks the Titanic trail in Manhattan. (4/11) ¶ The Existential Housecat, who speaks absolutely murdered French. (Thanks, Susan!) ¶ David Olivier has a vision. (Slimbolala; 4/18) ¶ “Should I Check My Email?” Wendy MacNaughton thinks, probably not. (The Rumpus; 4/24) ¶ The Most Average Girl in the World, Florence Colgate. (Artifacting; via MetaFilter; 4/30)

Noted: ¶ Why you ought to have 3 children, or none. (New Yorker; 3/3) ¶ Shawn Cornally discovers the awful truth about American “schooling.” (GOOD; 4/4) ¶ Killer Book Club. (The Millions) ¶ Perez Hamilton. (via kottke.org; 4/5) ¶ The strangely breathtaking Ted Wilson writes about a movie that he hasn’t seen (involving a zoo) — natch. (The Rumpus; 4/11) James Surowiecki on “Club Med” and the globalization of hip surgery. (New Yorker; 4/13) ¶ Titanic fragment: How there came to be a Widener Library at Harvard. (Brainiac; 4/13) ¶ All about iceberg tracking. (MetaFilter) ¶ Terry Teachout discovers the jewel of his neighborhood, Fort Tryon Park. (About Last Night) ¶ George Frazier’s duende. (Ivy Style) ¶ Jason Diamond visits Chartwell Books. (Paris Review Daily; via The Morning News; 4/18) ¶ Gel, foam, or emulsion: Rishidev Chaudhuri knows from eggs. (3 Quarks Daily; 4/24) ¶ Coffee is a lot more expensive than you think. (GOOD; 4/30)

There is still a good chance that I’ll get to the job that I’d planned to start after lunch: straightening up the refrigerator. It’s truly a job that I would almost do anything else to postpone, but I really couldn’t not sit down first and say a word about A Game of Hide and Seek, which I continued reading after lunch, and soon actually finished. It’s the ninth of Taylor’s novels that I’ve read — all the ones that you can buy off the shelf in the United States. The three remaining titles have been ordered by Crawford Doyle, and I can’t decide whether I hope that they arrive before I leave for Amsterdam and London at the end of next week. Also ordered, Nicola Beauman’s biography, The Other Elizabeth Taylor, which revealed the extramarital affair that Taylor had for many years with a painter whom she met at a Communist Party meeting.

I’ve read nine books, more or less in a row, by the same author, expecting, at the beginning of each one, to find my appetite sated by familiarity, but that has never happened, and in every case I’ve been sucked into the new story quite as compellingly as if I weren’t out to read everything by the author. Formally, the books are hugely different. None of the others, for example, has Hide and Seek‘s twenty-year narrative caesura; nor does any of the other books (that I’ve read) focus so intently upon a single attachment, which could be called the love story of Harriet and Vesey if that were not exactly what Hide and Seek Isn’t. The first half of the book takes place in the late Twenties; Harriet and Vesey have only just ceased to be children. Neither knows how to behave with the other. Harriet is painfully shy, and not only that: love seems to cause her real pain (which doesn’t make it any less desirable). Not the kind of agony that Derek Parfitt uses as the test for his propositions, assuming that we would do anything to avoid it and, if we were good, anything to spare others its misery, but pain nonetheless; you wouldn’t know to look at her that she’s in love. And Vesey is an impertinent, insistent autodidact, determined to learn nothing from anyone. The last days of their last childish summer together come to a Tennysonian sunset, and, after a spell of working in a dress shop, Harriet marries somebody else, a solicitor of substance whose mother used to be a star of the West End.

Then comes the break, and everything has changed when Vesey and Harriet meet at a dance as adults. For one thing, they know how to express the fact that they were in love and have never stopped loving the other — and they do so without talking. Tables have turned: Harriet is a proper provincial matron (High Wycombe?), while Vesey is an itinerant supporting actor (he plays Laertes when Hamlet comes to town). You wouldn’t think it possible, but the novel takes a turn towards Verdi territory when Harriet’s husband, Charles, decides not only to be jealous but to throw scenes. (“No woman,” Harriet reflects, “could have bided her time, as he had.”) There’s a sensational ensemble number with Charles and his dodgy law partner and the law partner’s dodgy wife (who thought that the “worse” in “for better or worse” would be her husband, nothing additional) standing about like aristocrats in Don Carlo or Otello, while Harriet drops a crystal glass, kneels to gather the fragments, cuts her self, and is swiftly joined by Vesey, who wraps her bleeing wound in a handkerchief, oblivious of the others. It’s the most exuberantly thrilling scene that I’ve ever read in any novel — any novel that wasn’t supposed to be thrilling, that is. You can’t believe that it’s happening in an English drawing room round about the time I was born.

Taylor follows this with the most extraordinary leap. Skipping over the lovers as if they weren’t there, she writes about Charles’ invigoration: having a grievance against his wife puts a spring in his step.

His attitude toward his mother was part of the change. Now he talked of her a great deal — as she had been as an actress, and strove to remember some of those successes which at the time he had resented. He seemed all of a sudden to know a great deal about the stage without everr having gone much to the theatre. A photograph of Julia as Cleopatra, with hair low on her brow, looped and strung about with pearls and looking bad-tempered, was discovered among some old letters and left propped on his desk. He often spoke of her precarious and arduous life, although she had been, as he said, at the very top of her profession.

Julia herself, the old ageing vamp, finds “a new lease on life” in her turn, as the direct result of Charles’s new affection. So does that of the granddaughter who takes after her, despite her fanciful dream that Vesey, and not Charles, is her father. (The truth is betrayed by an unconscious gesture right out of Julia’s playbook.) Only gradually do we come back to Harriet, or rather to what is now her Big Problem: how to remain respectable whilst being in love with another man. (And she is no longer pained by Vesey; he makes her happy now, as nothing else does.) I won’t go into any of this, except to say that Taylor assumes that the reader has read a few other novels and perhaps even seen a few movies (including one that rouses Julia’s indignation, involving “a middle-aged couple in raincoats, and it all took place on a railway-station”) and, in short, manages to convey Harriet’s first-time, I’ve-never-done-this-before panic without trying your patience. The end is quick and fine.

***

Now I’d better get Nescio under my belt, hadn’t I.

Where did April go?

I was about to go to the movies just now, but I’d have been a bit early, so I sat down and here I am. I’m going to see The Five-Year Engagement, largely because I adore Emily Blunt. She is always winsome — even in The Devil Wears Prada, there are moments of extreme winsomeness. What will become of this quality when the actress outgrows it? Or will she? Winsomeness is a special kind of dreamy hope about the future that makes young women beautiful and men of any age rather fatuous, unless they’re extremely frail-looking and marked for early death. (Who is marked for early death anymore? Tant pis pour la poésie.) Jason Segel, Ms NOLA told me, was asked to lose thirty pounds of avoirdupois for this movie. Which means that he may actually have a figure. His appearance in Jeff, Who Lives At Home was just this side of animated, and I don’t mean lively. I should note that I made up my mind to see the film on the strength of A O Scott’s really rather warm review in today’s Times.

Okay, now I can go.

***

The Five-Year Engagement is so good that I am STILL CRYING. All right, only when I think about it. But when I think about it, the waterworks start pumping! This wouldn’t be the case if the movie hadn’t ended happily, with possibly the ideal wedding, all things considered. (And all things were considered, which was the problem to begin with.)

The immediately foregoing is, I realize, evidence of my insuperable difficulties with Twitter. If I can’t have roughly 350 characters in which to say something, I won’t say anything.

***

Oh, the plans. I wanted to write about principles, as distinct from habits, and much less useful. I seem to have engaged in a project of discrediting the non-aesthetic legacy of the classical world, by which I mean, primarily, philosophy, a realm of thought that I don’t expect to survive the Cognitive Revolution. I believe that “acting on principle” is almost invariably childish; the phrase itself means nothing if it doesn’t mean acting against instinct and intuition. This isn’t to say that the objects of principles are unimportant, but rather to say that, if you’re refraining from murder as a matter of principle, then I hope that we’re not friends. I understand that principles help us to see over our immediate desires and short-sighted objectives. But they just as often make us do pigheaded things (the entire brain-dead scheme of “zero tolerance” comes to mind, as does “three strikes and you’re out”), and we ought to be able to be good without their aid. That would be adult.

Aristotle was right about habits, though; they’re tremendously important. When I was young, I thought that habitual acts were inauthentic. So I stopped saying “thank you.” We all go through such a phase; if we’re lucky, it lasts for only a few days. Flaubert had it right: you have to behave as regularly as possible so that your inner fire can burn as fiercely as possible. Without habits, we would live in chaos, and chaos is uninhabitable on the long term.

I also meant to deal with the refrigerator, but I couldn’t face it, so I spent the afternoon organizing my EMI CDs, of which there are of course many. The EMIs were the first discs to be “broken down” — the discs themselves inserted in labeled sleeves and tucked alongside their paperwork (booklets, back matter), and the jewel boxes thrown away — and I didn’t have a system for organizing the results; in fact, I hadn’t grasped the importance of the “tucked alongside” part. So two hours were devoted to re-uniting discs and booklets. It was just the kind of busy work I needed this afternoon, and I enjoyed listening to the Karajan Ring while I plowed through it.

You really really really couldn’t pay me to see the Ring at the Metropolitan Opera, something that a number of friends are doing this weekend and into next week. I love Wagner far too much to put up with Robert Lepage’s planks. The ideas people have!

Monday

Where to begin — that’s not the question. Where to end is the question. The weekend is technically over, but it left behind a bit of baggage that I’d like to dispose of before getting on with the week. I feel rather bad about not spending any time here. I was detained by a full array of excuses, ranging from hyper-efficient busyness on the housekeeping front to a sidewinding hangover that was stamped by the image, drawn from Friday’s movie (The Five-Year Engagement), of Jason Segel stumbling through a snowy woods, wearing socks, a muffler, a jacket, and a cap, and nothing else.

It was a different sort of hangover. It struck very early in the morning, at about five. I didn’t wake up still a little bit drunk (oh, that wasn’t so bad). I was gripped, at the metabolic level, by an existential anguish so intense that I had to get out of bed. I had a terrible headache, yes, and I felt vaguely poisoned throughout, yes; but I was wretchedly disappointed with myself. What had I been thinking, going out with a large group of men to dinner at the Knickerbocker. The situation ensured that all my manic buttons would be pushed at once, transforming me into a master bon viveur. And that, just as suddenly, the effect would be undone, and I would be sprawled in a gutter of senectitudinal shame. It had been so long since my last misbehavior that I’d quite forgotten how it might all work out. By the same token, it had been so long since that last time that it never occurred to me, even in my wildest exilharation, to drink anything stronger than sauvignon blanc. I drank a lot of wine. Then I got into a taxi and came home and went to bed. There was no public disgrace, no nakedness in the woods, no amputation of toes, no breaking-up of longstanding engagements. There was none of that. This hangover was confined entirely within my body.

For relief, I turned to Bruce Donaldson’s Colloquial Dutch (Routledge). In my chair by the window, I deployed the familiar but never-mastered points of Nederlands grammar in a scheme to jam the outgoing messages of bleak despair. It was imperative, it seemed, that I learn how to speak Dutch immediately. For I was going to Amsterdam after all. That had been settled the previous morning, after Kathleen, having read some fine print somewhere, conducted a ninety-minute transaction with a bookings agent and secured comfortable transatlantic passage for me (and for herself as well) on a flight leaving Newark for Heathrow (the coach ride from there to Schiphol was never a problem) in two weeks.

As the clerk in the electronics shop where I was buying a small radio said when I told him that I was trying to learn his language said: Why? With whom am I actually going to speak in the local language? And how far is this conversation going to proceed before it breaks down? Colloquial Dutch is about as well put-together a language course as you will find in one volume (Teach Yourself Dutch is also very good), but, perhaps because it’s designed for people who are actually going to live in the country for a while, its narrative premise, its cast of characters and representative dialogues, is that of family life. Piet and Pauline (she’s English) have two children, Marius and Charlotte. Marius is said to be seven years old (he celebrates a birthday — hij is jarig), but he behaves like a death star of adolescent self-absorption. His parents seem to get on one anothers’ nerves. It’s all usefully realistic — if you’re going to be living in a Nederlander household for a while. It really doesn’t sample the kind of things that I’d be likely to say.

Which would be?

On our way home, we’ll stop in London for a few days, so that Kathleen can check up on some clients. What will I say in London that requires advanced language training? To whom will I reveal my mastery of subordinate clauses? Come to think of it, when do such interactions occur here in New York? They don’t.

The hotel that we’ll be staying at is in De Pijp, a neighborhood southeast of the Museum Quarter, on the Jozef Israelskade. I believe that, in order to walk to the Spui (where the bookstores are), all I have to do is turn right at the hotel door, turn right again into Ferdinand Bolstraat, and keep walking (and walking), crossing the Singelgracht and proceeding to the Munt, where I’ll turn left along the Singel. I doubt that I’ll need to ask anyone for directions. The Rijksmuseum is almost on the way. All this I can see from Google Maps — what I didn’t already know, that is, from my last visit, when we stayed about a block away from the museum. If I feel very brave, I will ask for a taxi at the hotel and go to the Central Station, where I’ll catch a train for The Hague, where I can see Vermeer’s View of Delft and, of course, The Girl With the Pearl Earring. (Talk is cheap.)

I’ll certainly understand television broadcasts better than I did the last time, and I’ll be able to read more signs. But in Amsterdam, at least, it is not hard to find someone who speaks English. And in any case Bruce Donaldson’s exercises distracted me from the pain of detox until I was able to fall back into bed for a snooze. A late brunch with a law school classmate who’s in town for the Ring cycle was pleasant (Sancerre), but I took things very easy, ordering Chinese on the very early side and turning in not much later.

***

I hope to see The Five-Year Engagement again soon. I want to take Kathleen to see it, but, between our Amsterdam trip and an intervening visit to her father in North Carolina, Kathleen isn’t going to have a lot of free time in the next two weeks. Engagement is a wonderful picture, studded with beautifully-timed quirks and brought to life by a top-notch cast. Judd Apatow is going to wind up with his own studio one of these days. I jest, perhaps, but I do seriously begin to see parallels with a hiterto nonpareil: Preston Sturges. Qua moviemakers, that is; their movies themselves are not at all alike, beyond being funny. If I get hit by a bus before I have a chance to talk about The Five-Year Engagement at greater length, at least I’ll have noted the brilliant riff of taking Elmo and the Cookie Monster hostage as a way of “speaking French” in front of children.

Because of Diane Keaton alone, I will see Darling Companion again. Indeed, I’ll probably buy the DVD when it comes out (which may be very soon). Ms Keaton adds another sterling late-in-life performance to her charm bracelet, and she is assisted by an extremely engaging cast, including a never-better Dianne Wiest and a literally enchanting Ayelet Zurer. They say that Meryl Streep can play anybody, and it’s true; Diane Keaton is still, at the same age, America’s sweetheart. Every good woman in the land has something to learn from her. And every man, period.

But there is a difficulty about the movie, a difficulty that remains vague and not particularly oppressive until a scene near the end that stands in the place of a climax. Instead of a climax, it is the stuff of an anecdote that you might hear at Davos or at some other assembly of extremely wealthy people whose lives are so gated that they never brush anywhere near the portals. (Except in Manhattan, which is their recreational jungle.) Let us think back to Auntie Mame, to Gloria Upson’s saga of the ping-pong balls at the country club. “And then I said…And then she said…” Gloria represents a world in which, ordinary problems having vanished, one must make the most of ping-pong. So it is here.

The Disney version of Darling Companion would have focused on the adventures of Freeway, the runaway mutt whose disappearance causes so much angst to the human beings in his new life. Having been spotted at the side of an Interstate highway and then rescued by Beth (Ms Keaton) and her daughter, Grace (Elisabeth Moss), Freeway introduces Grace to the veterinarian whom she will marry a year later, at her parents’ Rocky Mountain vacation home. While being taken out for a walk by Joseph (Kevin Kline), Beth’s career-absorbed spinal surgeon, Freeway is seduced by the delights of the hunt when a deer lopes across the path. Joseph, fatally, is talking (about his career) on a cell phone, and he is not carrying the special orange whistle that hangs in abundant supply by the door of his chalet. That is the last we see of Freeway until the very end of the movie.

Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t for a moment wish to know more about Freeway’s Outward-Bound experience. I was not worried about whether he was alive or dead. Mind you, I was ticked, almost as much as Beth was, that Joseph wasn’t a very responsible pet steward; I believe that, if you are going to bring a pet into your life, then you must treat it with all the care and concern that you would give to a child (short of open-ended catastrophic medical procedures, that is, which seem unredeemedly cruel to me). A dog is not “just a dog,” once you’ve signed up to feed and shelter it. But although I loved our Labrador retrievers when I was growing up, it was a very childish and unintelligent affection, and when I grew old enough to be more mature about animals, I discovered that they didn’t interest me. So I, sitting in the darkened theatre, did not worry about Freeway. I was completely absorbed by the hunt for Freeway that ties up the six characters who remain at the Rocky Mountain lodge after Grace’s wedding to her veterinarian. (Goodbye, Elisabeth Moss!) As they hunt for the dog, the humans get to know each other better in difficult situations and become better human beings. A cast as great as this one can make you forget that you’ve seen this story before, and before and before and before.

In addition to Beth and Joseph, we had Penny (Dianne Wiest), Penny’s son (Mark Duplass) — also a spinal surgeon, and a colleague of his uncle’s back in Denver — and Penny’s new boyfriend, a dodgy-sounding entrepreneur called Russell (Richard Jenkins). Also, Carmen (Ms Zurer), the caretaker at the chalet. We could start with this detail; why not. Carmen is a ravishingly pretty half-gypsy who lives full-time at a mostly-uninhabited vacation house? (The question mark imposes itself.) And why don’t Beth and Joseph seem to know her very well? And what about the house that Beth and Joe break into when, lost in a storm while out looking for Freeway, they break a window, triggering an alarm that brings rescue to their feet? Why didn’t that house have a caretaker? Surely you don’t build a lovely faux-rustic trianon in the middle of highly scenic nowhere only to shut off the power and water when you’re not around, entrusting your property to the ministrations of a silent alarm. That’s what — that’s what ordinary people would do.

Ms Keaton and Mr Kline play Beth and Joseph, right up until the would-be climax, as ordinary, accessible overachievers; if you went to college anywhere, the odds are that there was a couple just like them in your class. But Lawrence Kasdan, who directs the film and who wrote it with his wife, Meg, have appliquéd ordinary Beth and Joe onto the very extraordinary lifestyle of Hollywood producers (Mr Kasdan is also a co-producer of Darling Companion). So when, instead of climax we must have anecdote, Beth and Joseph (and the rest of their party, which also gets an assist on the ground from Sam Shepard’s crusty sherriff) resort to criminal deception, violating five or six statutes governing civil aviation. You had to be there when this story was told the first time. In the movie’s lavish re-telling, the incident is not only unfunny but creepily narcissistic.  

We are all familiar with the concept of the train wreck, the movie that is so botched that it’s actually entertaining, as long as you can make your mind squint until verisimilitude is no longer an issue. (My favorite train wreck is Merci Docteur Rey, also starring Dianne Wiest.)  Darling Companion, also entertaining (the actors make sure of that), is another kind of disaster, the movie ruined by one single miscalculation. Mr Kasdan invested a great deal of skill and taste as well as money in Darling Companion, but he was mistaken about being able to make it fly.

***

I was right to finish my mention of tonight’s Carnegie Hall tickets, in the daily entry at Civil Pleasures, with a question mark  The weather’s grisly — penetrating and wet, worse, as far as I’m concerned, than snowfall at thirty degrees cooler — and I want to be sure not to miss any of this weekend’s events (more parties). My streak of concert cancellations this season has been unprecedented, to the extent that I’m wondering if I ought to renew any of my subscriptions. I’m even thinking about dropping Orpheus, which I’ll be missing on Saturday night because I’d rather go to a cocktail party. (Ms NOLA will take the tickets, and I know that she’ll have a good time, so I don’t feel any sense of waste. Tonight’s tickets, for a performance Dvorak’s Stabat Mater, are another matter, although I didn’t so much as buy them as take them along with good seats for Messiah at Christmas.) Increasingly, I don’t want to go out at night unless it’s to spend time with friends — and I don’t mean sitting still with friends.

The iPod playlists are undoubtedly to blame for my dismal attendance record. They have filled my brain with music that I never knew as well as I do now. Just this afternoon, I noticed that one little dance in Bach’s fourth French Suite takes for its theme a figure buried in the counterpoint of the preceding number. I realized that I knew that it was going to happen; I had heard the keyboard suites so many times in the past year that, even though I have to stop and think, which one is this?, I not only knew what was coming next but grasped that I was listening to a kind of prelude. In short, I am not hungry to hear music, and, because the playlists have made it possible for me to get to know multiple performances of many works very well — something that, as I’ve written elsewhere, was hard to achieve in the era of the LP, when every piece of music (or every record, at least) had to be physically chosen, thus putting a premium on “bests” and “favorites” — the music that I listen to at home is as varied as the music that I would hear in a concert hall. I wonder how much of what I’m saying makes sense to anyone interested in music, but not in classical music.

The second volume of Susan Sontag’s diaries has appeared, entitled As Consciousness Is Harnessed to the Flesh. What a ghastly title — I can’t believe that Sontag herself would have chosen it. “I’m irritated with images, often: they seem ‘crazy’ to me. Why should X by like Y?” Why speak of consciousness as harnessed when horses are harnessed precisely because they’re naturally independent (not to mention two of a kind). Reading Brian Dillon’s review in the Irish Times, I’m doubting that I’ll buy the book. I bought the first installment, Reborn, but almost immediately handed over to Ms NOLA.

It was embarrassing to see how insecure Sontag was about her gifts and her budding career, and Dillon writes that these worries did not dissipate even as she became the intellectual goddess of the Sixties. Her anxieties were excised from the published work that we got to see at the time. In public, Sontag spoke with a cool bravado that casually presumed that her readers were on the same page, if perhaps a sentence or a thought behind her. She was, in her photographs, so beautiful! Her beauty was the source of her authority. That’s so obvious now! When I do read the diaries — when they all come out, and, maybe if I’m lucky, get published in one volume — I’ll be interested to see how much she dared write even privately about the importance of her good looks. Certainly no ordinary-looking doofus would have been permitted to talk about all the unheard-of writers whom she served up like so many hot restaurant tips. (If you haven’t seen Annie Leibovitz’s utterly heartless photograph of Sontag’s corpse laid out for a wake, count yourself fortunate.)

I was in college when I read Against Interpretation. It convinced me that I would never measure up as an intellectual, possibly because the effort would be too great. Reading all the books and understanding them wouldn’t be the hard part. The hard part would be maintaining the stance (which you are free to think of as what it really is, a pose). Sontag could be a goddess because she was prepared to suppress her everyday humanity in a blaze of cerebral stylishness. The humanity is revealed in her diaries; she is perpetually announcing that she is on the verge of becoming a great writer — but she never, to her own satisfaction, quite gets there.

I also thought, reading “Notes on Camp,” that, if this was what the world was really like, it was arguably not worth saving.

***

Perhaps if I’d grown up ten years earlier, I would have seen “intellectual” for what it was, a fashion. The concept had been around for a century or so; it signified belief in the more or less Hegelian conviction that the universe was governed by metaphysical laws — scholasticism, in short — and that these laws would eventually but inevitable rid the world of what was not at the time called “yuppie scum.” And what could have been more scholastic than all the feuds on the Left? The Wars of the Cafés! After World War II, in this country, “intellectual” described a mildly paranoid view of the civil order as a vast conspiracy, or rather the conspiracy of a handful of secret agents operating over the vastness of the nation. One indispensable item in every intellectual’s kit was “contempt for the bourgeoisie.” Or so it seemed. In fact, there was always a tension between intellectuals who had been born and raised in bourgeois families and those from working-class backgrounds, with the latter substituting rudeness for clever condescension.

I am glad that no one sets out to be an intellectual anymore.

***

I hoped to revisit the subject of intellectuals this afternoon, but the hour that I’d have spent writing got chewed up by scheduling problems. I went to an earlier showing of Darling Companion (about which more tomorrow) and then trudged eastward to Alphabet City. I arrived before Will and his mother, but that was no inconvenience, just this once, for I was lugging a garden kneeler, one of those handy contraption that upends as a nice little bench. When they arrived, I was reading A Game of Hide and Seek in the late afternoon light. I say “just this once” because I won’t be carrying the bench in future; I had bought the one I was carrying to leave at Will’s. It makes picking up after him and sitting wherever he wants to play a great deal easier. Well, easy; it wasn’t.

Where did Will’s train table go, I asked Megan. Turns out Will played Godzilla with it, roaringly overturning the table top and sending Plan Toys tracks and Thomas the Tank Engines flying in all directions. The third time was the charm for his mother: the table was not set up again. I am sanguine about the savagery, for I believe that Will is the sort of child who will put this sort of behavior behind him fairly quickly. Been there done that, &c. With Kathleen and me, he was a quiet little fellow, engaged by Kipper when not hiding behind the sofa.

I must remember to wear an undershirt next time, no matter how warm it is. I know that he will sooner or later push his small wooden bus between the plackets of my dress shirt. I could fairly see the cogs turning while he played in my lap.

It was Megan and Ryan’s fourth anniversary! I’m so used to thinking of them as the world’s greatest parents that I lose sight of the romantic preliminaries.

After an early dinner, last night — Kathleen was grinding away on a project that had kept her busy all weekend — I finished reading In a Summer Season and immediately wrote to Peter Cameron, to tell him that a scene toward the end of Elizabeth Taylor’s eighth novel had evoked for me an apparently unrelated scene in his new novel, Coral Glynn. This evocation was a visceral upset, not a cerebral matching up of references or similarities. There were none of those that I could see. Nor was this some vague sense of déja vu. It was, rather, as though Coral had been standing behind Edwina in her “smart, dead” drawing room and exchanging glances with Kate. I knew that, if I were going to write about this unprecedented experience at all, I had better do it right away, and that, while striving for concision, I ought to include every pertinent detail of what I called a moment of “synesthesia.” It wasn’t, technically. Synesthesia is the blending, or confusion, of two different senses. But I did have the most uncanny sense of re-reading Coral Glynn even as I was reading In a Summer Season for the first time. It didn’t occur to me later that some readers might find in this an artistic failure of some kind, a staleness perhaps. But there was nothing stale about it for me; I was thrilled. The act of reading was, for a moment, electric in an entirely new way.  

Then I tried to pick a movie to watch. Ideally, it would have been Brief Encounter, only comic and in color. That is, it would have been Elizabeth Taylor’s version of Noël Coward’s fabulous tear-jerker, and not a tear-jerker at all. Sadly, this movie does not exist, so I found myself torn between Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, which is an adaptation of a novel by Taylor, and The Innocents, Jack Clayton’s 1961 transposition of Henry James’s novella, The Turn of the Screw. What The Innocents has to do with Taylor I couldn’t begin to tell you, but I suppose you could say that it was a movie that Taylor might have seen. What interested me wasn’t so much Freddie Francis’s remarkable cinematography, dreamy yet stark at the same time; I’d noticed that before. Nor was it Deborah Kerr’s operatic but Gothic reprise of her King and I role, as a governess in crinolines. What struck me was the madness of the screenplay. The screenplay is attributed to William Archibald and Truman  Capote, with “additional scenes and dialogue” provided by John Mortimer. (All very top drawer!) It is not nearly as unsettled as the novella. James leaves the governess’s soundness of mind open to question. There is a distinct possibility that she is imagining things. Not in the movie, however. The adapters’ governess may be a little intense, a little too presumptuously the angel of virtue, but she is not out of her mind. She knows what’s best for the children, and it isn’t to protect them from the ghosts of Quint and Miss Jessel. It’s more therapeutic than that, more in tune with the times of 1961. The governess is convinced that the only thing that will release the children from the ghostly spell of her predessor and her predecessor’s lover will be the little ones’ open acknowledgment of their corruption. You may agree or disagree about the wisdom of this treatment, but you won’t be wondering if Ms Kerr’s character is seeing things that aren’t there. This shift makes the movie itself, and not the governess, seem to be hysterical and overwrought. And not, I think, very faithful to the spirit of James’s story, which I shall have to re-read to be certain.

I watched The Innocents first, then Mrs Palfrey. I have been telling everyone that Dan Ireland’s 2005 adaptation is very faithful to Taylor’s (penultimate) novel. That can only have been because I hadn’t seen the movie in a while. The things that the filmmaker’s do to lighten up Taylor’s novel all work to infantilize it. Take Ludo’s mother, for example. There is no scene in the book in which Mrs Palfrey gets to tell Ludo’s mother how nice her son is, and it’s unlikely that Ludo’s mother would be affected by the remark. And the other elderly guests at the Claremont! They’ve been severely denatured. Mrs Arbuthnot, for example, is hardly the commanding figure that Anna Massey presents. Riddled with arthritis, she moves slowly and painfully with the aid of several canes, and in the night she cannot bring herself to get out of bed and walk down the hall to the communal loo. With the result that she is quietly asked to leave the Claremont. No dramatic collapse on the dining-room floor for her! Mr Osborne and Mrs Post are both made to be slightly dotty but basically lovable codgers. They’re not. In the novel, they’re sere, stunted trees, casting a malignant shade. I don’t think that the film gains anything by these softenings.

Finally, there is Joan Plowright herself. Ms Plowright gives a star turn in the title role, and no mistake, but she is ultimately too feminine for the part. She may be an old lady now, but she was a beautiful slip of a girl once, as you’ve only to see The Entertainer to understand, and that soft slip of a girl is still walking around in Joan Plowright’s body. What would have been better, could they have had her, would have been the late Joan Sanderson, the grimly frugal Mrs Richards in the great Fawlty Towers episode about flying tarts and a view of the wildebeests.

All the same, both movies are great to watch, and I enjoyed them more than ever for enjoying them a little more critically.

***

My visitor, George Borden, is, I’ve decided, an in-house accountant for an admiralty law firm. This means that he’s a steady worker more interested in stability than in big bucks, but also that he works in a small field, with not many genuine confrères. Whether or not George will still be an accountant working for a a specialty law firm by the time I’m done with him couldn’t matter less. The preliminary decision has taught me a lot about him, or rather allowed me to know him better. George’s wife, Alice, works for a charitable foundation whose funder is interested in public housing. The next thing to know is the character of the neighbor. Ah: I see that she is a retired executive secretary. What shall we call her? More important: is she the catalyst, the person who opens an unexpected door for George? Or is it someone to whom she is connected, someone who will take George out of his apartment building? Each one of these details is like a crumb of bread that, holding them out in my hands, attracts further details.

George’s story is about getting older, but it is not a story about decline.

After the long weekend away from the computer, I was tempted, this morning, to stretch the “long weekend” concept a bit, and to fold in a paragraph or two at the end of the preceding entry. But here I am, remembering the cherry blossoms that have long since scattered in the wind and rain. Another annual moment of extraordinary loveliness has come and gone. It was difficult to enjoy this year, because the sense of a regular, ordered world that their serried April blooms have signified in the past was this year, and not for the first, undermined by the upheaval of subway station construction outside our door. From the very start, the project has worn for me a sinister military air, as if the intersection were a checkpoint within a divided city. Civilian life does flow, largely unimpeded, all about the concrete stancheons and the fenced-in backhoes and the curious multistorey structures, and amidst the men in hard hats and orange vests, more and more of whom seem to be carrying paperwork. But, no doubt because I am old, the work is not exciting but only stressful. I am always wondering if I will live to see the end of it, not because the official completion date is so far away (what’s five years?), but because it’s hard to believe that such an extensive rupture of urban fabric can ever be repaired.

The weather is thick and gloomy. I slept badly, troubled by irritating dreams crowded with banal anxieties. (Wondering whether I had packed enough underwear recurred throughout the series.) Then there was the question, “What does George Borden do?” George Borden is something of an incubus at the moment. Yesterday, he didn’t even have a name. This morning, he not only got that but a wife named Alice. George and Alice raised two children in one of the suburbs, but moved into the city when the younger one was killed in a high-school graduation-party drunk-driving accident (how innocent a victim, I haven’t decided). Alice had always wanted to move back into the city when her children were out of school, but it was only several years after the move that she realized that George never did, and wouldn’t have done if he hadn’t wanted to leave the scene of the tragedy, which in his mind extended to anywhere dependent on automobiles; and so Alice feels a bizarre guilt, having benefited so conveniently from her child’s death. All of this came to me this morning. What will come of it? Probably nothing. Especially if I can’t think what it is that George Burden does for a living, because that is who he is. I do know that he does something that anyone who didn’t do it would find “boring.” I know that there are jillions of odd jobs out there, served out in anonymous buildings on the west side of midtown, but I don’t know anything about them. I’m tempted to make something up.  

***

If I’d been more alert this morning, I should have said something about the Walmex scandal, so brilliantly exposed by the Times in yesterday’s paper. First, I shall be very surprised if any government will take any action that will severely punish (damage) Wal-Mart and its subsidiaries. As I read David Barstow’s long but unusually lucid article, I could hear the pens of conservative scribes been sharpened against what will doubtless be dismissed as the “elitist” smear of an outstanding American enterprise that has done its level best to compete in foreign markets whose ways we ought not to presume to understand. (Even if former Wal-Mart attorney Maritza Munich did go to the trouble of pointing out that bribery is illegal in Mexico [period!].

The second thing that I want to suggest is Wal-Mart “deserves” protection because it is one of the most vital elements in American political life: surely it has led the way in removing the sting from vast income inequalities by providing an abundant amount of halfway stylish stuff to Americans of limited means. There really isn’t anything that the wealthiest Americans can own, in the ordinary of course, that their poorer countrymen can’t afford in some cheaper version. What the wealthy do uniquely command today is a combination of personal service and personal access, but service is invisible, and ordinary people would be tongue-tied over dinner with stars. What we expect from service and access is pretty idiosyncratic, as any waiter can tell you. But everyone expects a big-screen TV to hook up to ESPN. And almost everyone can afford a big-screen TV — or can acquire one, for better or worse credit-wise. This is not a world in which only the rich see the game in color.

Friday

The weekend will be bracketed by parties. This evening, we celebrate Kathleen’s birthday as well as that of an old friend, here; and, on Sunday, we cross town for an Open House on Riverside Drive — an old classmate of Kathleen’s has redone her apartment.

I hope to finish Donna Leon’s Beastly Things, which I’ve been rating as better-than-average Brunetti, probably because Signorina Elettra figures prominently. Not only that, but Vianello, Brunetti’s most trusted colleague, insists on commiserating, if that’s the words, about the signorina’s almost certainly illegal Internet searches: the worst of it is, he says, that, like serial murders, he and Brunetti have come to enjoy this criminal activity. Readers certainly do. Signorina Elettra is a sort of porn goddess of information. Elegant and elusive, she will produce, for her faithful acolytes, everything that there is to know about businessment and politicians. If she worked for a newspaper, it would collapse in a month, from sheer flagrancy. Leon’s ironic achievement is to make an Orwellian police force appear to be benign.  

***

The desserts are here, and the salmon mousse is in the fridge. I’ve got a few things to do today, but I’ve tried to make it easy on myself. We will be eight at table: the maximum. The three ladies are all slight, but four of the five men are not, and it will be a jolly squeeze. I’ve planned four courses: a pea and lettuce soup; the mousse, with a salad of endive, apples, and Roquefort; a beef tenderloin with béarnaise, and sweet potatoes; and finally the two cakes from Greenberg.

When I went to pick up the cakes yesterday, the assistant said to me, “Oh, Mr Keefe, I called you; we have a problem; the cakes will be late.” At the end of a bit of hemming and hawing, the assistant said that she would drop off the cakes on her way home. I don’t think that this unexpected offer was motivated by umbrage on my part, but sometimes, just standing there, I can look pretty fierce. I made it a point to be near the phone toward the end of the afternoon, and shortly after four, it rang, and the assistant told me that her “boss” was going to swing by in her car and leave them with the doorman. I gathered up my keys and my book and went down to the lobby at once. I stood there for ten rather uncertain minutes, wondering if the subway construction would make pulling into our driveway difficult. I alternately read and fretted in little bits. But when a dark SUV stopped at the door, I could see the top of a Greenberg shopping bag perched next to the driver, whom I approached before she could get out of her car. Her passenger side window was up, so she couldn’t hear me when I asked if she was dropping off the cakes to which I was pointing. She shook her head sweetly but briskly, the sensible standard way of dealing with officious madmen in New York. But I persisted. Eventually the window was lowered. When I repeated my question, eyebrows shot up and I was asked if I was Mr Keefe. It occurs to me now that I could have simply said that I was. Which of course I did. The cakes were handed over.

The tenderloin has just been delivered.

***

I’ve just embarked on the seventh novel of Elizabeth Taylor. Not her seventh, but the seventh to read. I’ve chosen A Wreath of Roses, largely because Lauren, at Crawford Doyle, remarked yesterday that it may be her favorite. The fact that it was written before Angel was also a factor in my decision. Angel, something of an outlier in Taylor’s oeuvre, makes a convenient divider between the early novels, which are shadowed by the sickly pall of postwar austerity, and the late novels, in which the exuberance that followed is seen to have deracinating effects. For a good part of yesterday, I read The Soul of Kindness, a later novel by these lights, and it ministered to my convalescent soul, recovering from the previous night’s chute of despair. I cannot say that yesterday was a wretched day, but it was not a happy one, not until I really understood what Mrs Folley’s love-letters were all about. In The Soul of Kindness, Mrs Folley is a housekeeper who presumes to read “recently rediscovered” love letters, ostensibly addressed to her younger self, to her employer, a well-born woman who finds herself adrift after the marriage of her beloved daughter, Flora (“the soul of kindness”). Mrs Secretan, the employer, is horribly embarrassed by these readings, not only because of their fatuous effusions but because she can “recognize the handwriting.” At first I took this to hint at terrible infidelities on the part of someone dear to Mrs Secretan, but in time the fog lifted, and I saw who the author really was, and when I did I couldn’t stop laughing for ten minutes. The laughter came in involuntary barking bursts, like hiccups; each convulsion emptied my mind, but only for a moment, as the lunacy of Mrs Folley’s folly quickly flooded it again, prompting another exclamation. Of course I was also laughing at my own thickness.

Saturday

There’s a lot to be said for hosting a dinner party on a Friday night, especially if Saturday is your day for tidying up the house. I’ll be at it all day, cleaning up and tidying, but I’m in no hurry, and I’ve resolved to leave more of the dirty work to the dishwasher, which certainly takes its time.

Kathleen had a wonderful evening and thought that the party was a great success. I think that it would be have been much more pleasant if I had thought through where to put the bar. Poor planning had me carving the tenderloin and slicing the cakes on a tray table at an odd angle to my chair; poor Ms NOLA, sitting to my right, was very inconvenienced, not to say alarmed that something might tip off the edge of the rackety workspace. All that slicing could have been done at the sideboard, by the kitchen door, but I had foolishly set up the bar there, when it ought to have been on the writing table in the living room.

Other than that… the béarnaise sauce broke in the making, but I patched it back together with additional egg yolks. Everything else more or less prepared itself. The ring of salmon mousse, filled with a salad of apple, endive and green onion that was dressed with nothing more than roquefort and the juice of an orange that had been lying about and getting in the way on the counter, would make a very nice luncheon dish or perhaps even a late-night supper, with nothing needed but a crusty loaf. The pea soup was too thick, porridgy even, but it tasted spring-like. The roast was done to a turn and tasted every cent of its five-figure price (I exagerrate slightly). The sweet potatoes — I’m in danger of overdoing them, making them too often. They’re frightfully easy and they taste like dessert, but anything can be overplayed. I had meant to steam some Yukon Golds and then, after ricing, pipe them into duchesse potatoes, but that would have stretched my logistics and risked ruining everything.

As Kathleen and I waited in the foyer for the guests to arrive — how nice it was to have Kathleen there with me, the first to arrive perhaps but not a guest — I thought that, if I sat down, I should never stand up, and that, when I did stand up, I would forget how to serve dinner. In the event, I was revived by the rush of talk with which the party began. And, when everybody left, I had the vigor to fill the empty dishwasher and get the clean-up going.

***

I had to fight back tears at the end of Beastly Things, Donna Leon’s latest and, I think, greatest Commissario Guido Brunetti Mystery. The scene was tremendously affecting, loaded with pathos. I was sorry to close the book; I had enjoyed reading it very much. Especially the part that I read yesterday at lunch.

Before beginning the day’s preparations for the evening’s party, I treated myself to lunch at the Seahorse Tavern, which is tucked just off Second Avenue on 85th Street. The high-rise apartment building across the street was built in the era of public spaces; its foundations stand well back from the curb, and the public space is planted with so many trees that, from a table in the open French door of the tavern, I could imagine an Italian piazza, perhaps even a Venetian camp. The day was so lovely and the traffic so slight that I could even imagine that 85th Street itself was a canal. Although wrapped in the book, I was not unaware of pleasant surroundings. And I noticed right away that a woman passing by was detouring toward me. She was a handsome woman younger than myself, carrying two shopping bags; she reminded me very much of one of Kathleen’s old summercamp friends. She smiled at me and said that she had just “this very minute” bought the book I was reading; was it as good as the others? I said that it was great, and that, in keeping with Leon’s issue-oriented writing, the new book was about slaughterhouses. “Can’t wait,” she said, and was on her way. Only then did I think what I ought to have said, which is that Signorina Elettra is back. She never really went away, but I missed her in the more recent books.

Here is a passage that made me stop and think, while I was enjoying lunch on the rio 85^imo:

The softness of the late afternoon encouraged him to walk in the vague direction of San Polo, turning or stopping where whim indicated. He had known this part of the city decades ago, when he took the train daily to Padova to attend his university classes and chose to walk back and forth to the station because it saved him — how much had it been then? — the fifty lire of boat fare. It had been enough for a sweet drink or a coffee; he recalled with the affection age brings to the weaknesses of youth that he had chosen coffee only when with his classmates, giving in to his normal preference for sweet drinks when alone and there was no one to judge his choice unsophisticated.

For a moment, he considered stopping for one of those drinks, if he could only remember their names. But he was a man and had laid aside the things of childhood, and so he stopped for a coffee, smiling at himself as he poured in the second envelope of sugar.

The Biblical reference struck a scolding note, I thought at first, as though Brunetti were obliging himself to pretend to forget the names of those sweet drinks. But I looked at it again and the note did not strike; I saw what it was to lay aside childish things. It means to forget them — in effect, to lose them forever. (Proust’s madeleine is of course a reminder that old memories can be surprised into life by circumstances, but that is something else.) When I was growing up, from the age of seven until who knows when, I was very anxious about becoming a man; when would it happen, and how would I know. In a way, it never did happen; then it was seen to have happened. Very much like going to sleep.

Sunday

A dreary day. Kathleen has been working full time on her small computer, trading the convenience of three screens at the office for that of staying home. We shall be attending this evening’s party on the early side, as we must leave early for dinner with a business friend of Kathleen’s who is in from London. I thought about working in the kitchen, straightening some cabinets and taking stock of the refrigerator, but it seemed wiser to give myself a break after Friday’s party and yesterday’s cleanup (which took a full five hours). It was also more agreeable to read, and to finish, A Wreath of Roses, Elizabeth Taylor’s “dark” novel.

The principal scene of this novel is the country cottage of a woman at the end of middle age who happens to be a highly-regarded painter. Every summer, two women come to spend their holiday with her, one of them her charge from governessing days (we are reminded that Taylor herself was a governess, before she married), and the other that charge’s friend from Swiss boarding school. The younger women would have to be in their thirties, because they’ve been enjoying this annual gathering for a very long time. But now everything is different. One girl has married and had a baby. The other is retracting into spinsterhood. And Frances, the painter, finds herself passing, as introducer Helen Dunmore puts it, from “self-sufficiency to the weakness of old age.”

It is when Mrs Parsons pays her weekly housecleaning visit, “to do the rough,” that we get a finest picture of Frances.

So intent was she on being a normal elderly woman, so much trouble did she take, that she would always rather be praised for her crab-apple jelly than her painting, for the first was a marvel to her, the other natural to her and inevitable. Detesting the artists she had met and the milieu in which they usually worked she painted at set hours and did the washing-up first, remembering always Flaubert’s advice to artists — “Be regular and ordinary in your life, like a bourgeois, so that you can be violent and original in your works.” She would have been distressed beyond measure and bewildered if she had known how extraordinary the villagers thought her, or how Mrs Parsons on Saturday nights at the pub, spoke of her as “my poor dear lady,” pitying her, or told stories of her little mad kindnesses, her presents of money, of dried herbs, of cowslip wine, of jars of honey, of advice: how she had searched the snowy fields one winter’s night, hearing a rabbit crying in a trap, and had given her dinner to the dog when she was short of meat and eaten bread and marmalade herself. These actions, so natural to Frances that she would never have believed that ordinary people would behave otherwise, were enough to set the stories circulating, but she remained quite ignorant of them, and when Mrs Parsons took her arm, she thought it a gesture of simple kindness, not protection.

A Wreath of Roses reads more like Ivy Compton Burnett than any other Taylor novel that I’ve encountered (and this was my seventh out of the twelve); the dialogue is studded with deadpan retorts in which the elements of an initial comment are rearranged to in the form of an objection. The novel is also a tribute of sorts to To the Lighthouse; Frances and her admirer, Morland Beddoes, share wise and wry observations, never as bitter as Lily Briscoe’s but just as detached from the narrative current. (Well, they are the narrative current.) And with the fugitive Richard Elton, Taylor palpates the madness of Septimus Smith.

***

Things are said to come in threes, but I’ll be very happy to stop at two. First, one of the alabaster lamps in the living room seemed to have fused during the night, and then a glass canister slipped from its perch on a plastic one and shattered on the kitchen floor. I believe that it contained powdered milk, used for baking bread — yet another of those special ingredients that fill the mouthwatering pages of the King Arthur catalogue. I haven’t baked bread in a while; I quite lost the rhythm last summer, not only because of the month on Fire Island but because Will stopped being able to sit through dinner. Sweeping up the shards along with the powder, I saw that I must let go of another useless notion, which is that a kitchen ought to be well-stocked with staples. Although I’ve cut back greatly on the number of canisters and other storage containers, I still have too many.

The leftover tenderloin (which wasn’t as expensive as I thought it would be; I saw the bill when I upacked the calf’s liver for last night’s dinner) makes the most delicious sandwiches, sliced very thin and spiked with a bit of Wisconsin Buttermilk Blue, which is the cheese that I used in Friday’s night’s salad (not Roquefort), tucked into a toasted English muffin. Indeed, I think that I’ll go have one now.

***

What’s better than a two-bedroom apartment in a classic prewar building on Riverside Drive? Two apartments. one atop the other. And not only that, but one just below the treetop line and one just above it. At this time of year, the lower floor gives out onto a Parisian scene; the Bois de Boulogne might be stretching beyond the foliage. The view from the higher flat stares straight into the Hudson and out over the Palisades. Our friends have had the downstairs apartment for years; the death of an owner directly overhead made expansion possible. Divulging further, even more remarkable features would be an invasion of privacy, but, frankly, the view is all you need to think about.  

Later, at Nice-Matin, having dinner with a friend who’s in town from London, we looked out and wondered if someone was making a movie. It was raining that hard. But we managed to get home without getting too wet.

The United States is populated, by and large — still — by the descendants of European men and women whose dissatisfaction with their lot impelled them to risk the dangerous crossing of a tempestuous ocean to an unknown land of dreams and opportunity. I am but a pale reflection, a degraded spinoff of these courageous forebears. I have known since my schooldays that their experiment in liberal democracy was a failure, but I have been too attached to everyday comforts to uproot myself and leave, not for a better place (there is none) but for an exile in which I should be able to say, I am not one of these people. New York City, it is true, provides the maximum protection from the American experience, but it remains, alas, an American city. I am ashamed not to have moved on.

Kathleen will read this (on her birthday, no less) and believe that it was all her fault. If she had told me about the notice, posted in the elevator at some point in the evening, long after I had gone downstairs to pick up the mail, about a water-tank cleaning that would close down the plumbing between midnight and six in the morning, then we’d have gone to bed under normal circumstances, and not with me consulting the Internet for advice about slitting my wrists. But of course it wasn’t her fault, even if I carried on as though it were. I no more expect Kathleen to keep me apprised of this building’s shambolic management’s caprices than I expect her to boil and egg for me in the morning. It’s not her fault at all; it’s mine. I’m the one who has tolerated and temporized. In the event, the water was running again within two hours; as I was sulking at the computer, I heard it gurgle up through the pipes. But that’s not what the big deal was. The big deal, which I contrive to conceal from myself day by day, is that my home is owned by dim and thoughtless people, arguably unfit for their responsibilities, and that my home is situated in a land where it’s expected that “market forces” will solve every problem eventually.

The other day, I went to a wake, and I looked at the strikingly well-preserved lady in her early nineties and said to myself, that’s the next thirty years, going from this to that. “This” is already pretty degenerate. My back is an column of unmoving bone, and I don’t know how much longer I’m going to be able to get around without knee surgery. I’m overweight, which makes everything worse, but I know why — I read it in a book. Specifically, a book by a French gentleman who proudly resettled in this county, named Clothaire Rapaille. In his book about marketing to “the reptilian brain,” he claims that obesity, in America, is the sign of “checking out.” It is a passive protest against the ways things are. Just as my continuing to live here, instead of figuring out a way to emigrate when I was still young, was passive.

I cannot leave now. I’m bound by ties of the deepest affection for my wife, my daughter, and my grandson. I owe it to them to take care of myself and to die of natural causes. And to stay put. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for them. By and large, they really do make me forget where I live, so much so that the occasional obtrusive reminder is horribly shocking.

It seemed like a good idea at the time, but perhaps you can chalk that up to vino. As I was drying the forks and spoons after dinner last night, I thought that it might be fun to write about our patterns, and the story of how they came into our lives. Yes — definitely the wine. Yet, even as I sat down in the seasonably cool morning and tasted the folly of my scheme, I stuck with the headline, because, hey, there is was. And there it will remain until and unless I think of something else.

***

When I was young — up to about three years ago — I dreamed of owning Audubon, a Tiffany silver pattern that seems designed for hands even larger than my own. The pieces have unusually broad handles that swell out to make room for little reliefs of Audubon’s birds. It is very 1880s, and very serious without being beholden to the baroque fantasies that prevail in the land of heavy silver. When I was young — 30 years ago — a teaspoon in the pattern cost about $200. I dreamed of buying a piece a month. And that is all I did. I never actually bought anything.

Dreams of Audubon wilted for many reasons. First, of course, one simply grew up. But no, it’s not that; if our lives had branched out toward an increase in entertaining, instead of toward less, the embers of my longing might not have been allowed to go cold. Third (in any case), we inherited Kathleen’s mother’s silver, which is Buckingham, a Gorham pattern that Kathleen always liked because she grew up with it, “not that it’s my favorite pattern ever.” So you might have thought that when we got married, she’d register for that.

[Historical note: In 1981, when Kathleen and I were married, brides still registered at nice shops for china, crystal, and silver, and grooms never appeared in wedding notices in the Times.]

But no, she thought it was too expensive, and that therefore we wouldn’t get any, so she chose instead the Towle pattern Queen Elizabeth, which is a bona fide knockoff, meaning that you have only to look at it to see that it’s the less-nice version of something else. It was Queen Elizabeth that fanned my ardor for Audubon. And something might have come of that if a lot of things had worked out differently, such as not buying a country house &c, but also I was calmed by the inheritance of my mother’s silver, in about 1987, after my father died. Also a Towle pattern, Silver Plumes was what I had grown up with, and I liked it not only for that reason but also because it wasn’t elaborate. But it also wasn’t very substantial — it was almost children’s silver. Also it had been degraded a bit by the primitive dishwasher detergents that, in the early postwar period, worked like sandblasters. Nevertheless: country house and all that. And when the country house chapter came to an end, the Internet chapter began. And now we finally have the Buckingham that Kathleen always wanted. End of story.

Not. A few months ago, while I was sipping a glass of wine at Ray Soleil’s, he said that he wanted to show me something. He opened his hall closet, which contains many more treasures than Ali Baba’s cave, and extracted what I think was a shopping bag. In the shopping bag were sealed plastic bags containing place settings of ravishing stainless steel. The handles were bent and folded in a way that simulated, at least to my eye, the way a plain piece of flatware would waver in outline if it were lying at the bottom of a limpid mountain brook. I had never seen anything quite so magical. Why the Pottery Barn, which introduced the pattern and sold it for a short time. Ray bought it then but never used it. I had to have it. Not Ray’s, of course. I had to go to Replacements, and buy a few pieces every month. $200 might buy three or even four pieces.

The last time I attended a funeral in New York City, it was held at the same church that I’m off to this morning, St Vincent Ferrer. Then it was the father; today it is the mother of Kathleen’s very old friend. I believe that I’ve been to one funeral in between. It would surprise me to learn that I’ve been to as many as ten funerals in my lifetime. I don’t believe that I’ve ever been to the funeral of a friend of my own, which is partly great good luck and partly proof that I have never had many close friends. At this point in time, I doubt that I would leave the metropolitan area (fly, that is) to attend any funeral at all. Nor, I think, would I go if the dead person’s connection to Kathleen were not a strong one. That’s to say that, left to myself, I would make it a point not to go to funerals.

Or would I? I must say that I’m keen to see who shows up this morning. Following Proust, Alan Hollinghurst and Edward St Aubyn are but two novelists who have recently made use of the funeral roll-call as a narrative device so irresistible that its a forcible reminder of our primate antecedents.

Today’s funeral is also going to be a Mass, which is a great bore. I can hardly hear liturgical formulas anymore without wanting to scream — scream! — for them to stop. This has nothing to do with atheism or agnosticism or any metaphysical considerations at all. It has to do with the conviction that the Roman Catholic Church long ago embalmed the teaching of Jesus in amber, as a way of shutting him up, and set the ornament in a jewelled monstrance of incredible vulgarity. In short, I feel the revulsion of one of the more austere Protestant divines, five hundred years ago. Something like that. Nothing is new under the sun.

***

Babysitting for Will last night was a companionate affair. He watched videos on the iPad for nearly two hours, every now and then coming over to where I was sitting for a hug (his idea) and a few crumbs from the muffin that he steadily dismantled, raisin by raisin, throughout the evening. I read feeds on the Kindle Fire. When Will had had enough of Kipper (adorable), Thomas, and Pingu (not so much), we went into his room and settled down for the night. He lay on his pillows with his bottle while I sat at the edge of the bed and read A Child’s Garden of Verses. I read the whole book, but when I was through, he was asleep.

***

The funeral was difficult. Something had set inside me since my last experience of Catholic liturgy, and the result was that there was no way in which I could pretend to be part of the community gathered together for the Mass. If I had been brought up in another faith, perhaps I might have sat respectfully through the service, but that was not the case, not the case at all. If the essence of Christianity is faith in personal redemption through Jesus Christ — to the extent that that’s another way of describing an afterlife in heaven — I am very settled in my unchristianity. To say more, or to put it more vehemently, seems pointlessly rude, and I mean no disrespect to those who draw comfort from Christian faith. But I can never share it — either the faith or the comfort. I never have, and I should never want to.

When I was a child, the idea that faith could be a comfort was pretty laughable: religion was really just a set of roadmaps for going to hell. Do this and you’re damned, do that and you’re damned, &c. Whatever the fine points of penitence might be, the Dominican nuns who saw to my introduction to catechism had one simple goal: to scare the hell out of us, especially the clever ones like me. Well, they scared me, all right; I’m terrified of stern, unmarried women. I should like to live in a world without them.

But I saw, this morning, as I have never seen it before, that faith is a comfort, even if it can’t be one for me. St Vincent’s almost trembled with a collective faith in eternal life in the presence of God. For the first time in my life — I’m not kidding! — I could imagine wanting to go to church. I don’t think that I had ever believed that that was possible, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. No, I hadn’t believed it. I had simply assumed that many other people were more disciplined and obedient than I. (I am not disposed to obedience.) I assumed that the only motivation for religious observance was Pascal’s wager. A desire for the religious life — I had never seen that before today. I had only seen the habit.

At the end of one of this morning’s nightmares, I awoke from being chased through a littered stable yard by a riderless, untackled thoroughbred horse. I believe that chasing people down is something that horses do only in nightmares. The dream was probably brought on in part by the warm, humid weather, itself almost as alarming as a nightmare, considering the date. Also, I was malingering. I had stayed up late (reading Donna Leon), and I was sleeping in late. The urgency of the horse dream has passed, but its hopelessness persists: I feel old and powerless this morning, and likely only to feel moreso. Staying up late and being unable to get up bright and early the next morning have taken the place, as vices that lead straight to remorse, of drinking too much and hangovers. I suppose that there’s an improvement there somewhere, but I don’t much feel it this morning, which, of course, it barely is.

Why is Jean Zimmerman’s book about Edith Minturn and Newton Phelps Stokes so sad? Is is because she dies at the end, having been kept housebound by strokes for five years? We all die in the end. Is it because he lingered on alone, relatively impecunious, for seven further years, dying in 1944? Why would that be sad, exactly? Would it be because he missed his wife (which he presumably did), or would it be because the work that had preoccupied him for nearly twenty years, the massive Iconography of Manhattan Island, was achieved to rather quiet acclaim? Is it because his adopted daughter, Helen, doesn’t seem, in Zimmerman’s telling, to have “been there” for him and his wife during their declining years? Is this sadness to be imputed to the Phelps Stokeses themselves, or is it something that the author must share with the reader? When you’re made to feel sad by a story, you do want to know why.

I can put my hands on two reasons why Love, Fiercely left me feeling gloomy. First, there was the Stokeses’ profligacy. Like the last Medici bankers and their agents, the Stokeses got much better at spending money than at making it, and when papa Anson Phelps Stokes died, the upper crust was horrified to find out how small his estate was. What ought to have been twenty million amounted to a mere one. In the Crash, Newton Phelps Stokes’s financial investments were immediately devalued, but it was the slow leakage of value from his extensive real-estate holdings that made him a little bit poorer every year for the rest of his life. He had, it is true, spent a fortune on the Iconography, but it was always more the commitment in time that upset his wife.

And that’s the other reason: we know that Edith was upset about his obsession with the Iconography because he told his friends that she was, and Zimmerman takes this at face value. But we never actually hear it from Edith. We never hear anything from Edith. We read other people’s letters, but never hers. She is never quoted. Her hands-on philanthropy is attested to — she was a leader of the kindergarten movement, and she seems to have taught immigrant women how to sew, in a school set up at St George’s. She smiled for the camera every now and then, and of course she allowed herself to be painted and sculpted — it’s because of one painting, particularly, that we’re reading about her and her husband. But if Edith Minturn had a voice, Zimmerman has not captured it, and her muteness is like a wound. It is like The Portrait of a Lady all over again, with different details but the same suffocation. Only, this time, it really happened.  

Saturday

Although I read everything but the first section after breakfast, I don’t remember a single thing from today’s Times. Jean Zimmerman’s chapter about the art world of 1890s Manhattan, centered on the still-unpaved 57th Street, drove the faits divers right out of my head.  

As I tidy the apartment this afternoon, I’m listening to a recording of Il Trovatore that I’ve owned for ages but never listened to, the one conducted by Sir Colin Davis, with Katia Ricciarelli and José Carreras. And an unknown voice: Stefania Toczyska. I must ask Fossil Darling about her.

After Il Trovatore, I turned to Rigoletto, and a recording that I know very well (Solti, Moffo, Kraus, Merrill). It came to an end a few minutes after I put away the dusters. I really really must get serious about reading Peter Conrad’s Verdi/Wagner. The problem is that, as the biggest book in the pile, it stays at the bottom.

Sunday

Charles McGrath’s piece about Robert Caro, in this weekend’s Times Magazine, had me thinking more about books. The piece’s title aptly describes Caro as a dinosaur; it’s impossible to regard him as anything but the last of a kind. The last of the run of historians who worked without making use of the Internet, for one thing. The last to use a typewriter — that sort of thing. But he’s the last of a kind in a different way, which I think McGrath pinpoints here:

Caro thought that the 1948 Senate election would take up a single chapter or so in his Senate volume. Instead, it takes up most of a book of its own, what is now Volume 2. Johnson advocates used to say that “no one will ever know” whether that election was stolen. Caro knows, because he uncovered a handwritten memoir by Luis Salas, an election boss and party henchman, giving the details of how he falsified the records. The Senate book, Volume 3, begins with a 100-page history of the Senate, starting with Calhoun and Webster, because Caro felt that to understand the Senate you needed to see it in its great period. It includes minibiographies of Hubert Humphrey and Richard Russell Jr., the longtime Senate leader of the South, and ends with a detailed, almost vote-by-vote account of the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957. The first few weeks of the Johnson presidency, which take up so much of the new book, were originally imagined as just a chapter in what would be the final volume, and the new book also includes much more about the Kennedys than Caro anticipated.

Future historians will probably refer readers to someone else’s 100-page history of the Senate; failing that, the historian’s account will be published as a separate work. McGrath notes that 350,000 words were cut from the original manuscript of The Power Broker, and I hope that a complete edition of Caro’s text will be published eventually. I’d love to read the notoriously omitted chapter about Jane Jacobs’s run-ins with Robert Moses, for one thing; for another, completeness would heal the hacked disarray of the later chapters, which clearly announce a compromising determination to get out the bad news about world’s fairs and the even worse news about urban renewal. Caro has already done the work; it needs only to be printed. But would anyone do such work in the age of the Internet? I don’t want to sound naively optimistic about the Web’s encouragement of collaboration, but I do envision a gradually coalescing group project in which grand narratives are parceled out to hosts of writers, each of whom knows his adjacent fields almost as well as his own. I’m not talking about a single grand unified history of everything; there can never, thank goodness, be any such thing. A galaxy of histories would be more like it. Or perhaps the genome is a better model.

McGrath notes that Caro thinks about writing a biography of Alfred E Smith, the New York Governor who ran for President against Hoover and Roosevelt (the latter at the Democratic Convention of 1932), and who was Moses’s ultimate protector. (After Smith, Moses no longer needed protection.) What can he be thinking? There’s more than enough about Smith tucked into The Power Broker. It would be writing the same book twice. 

***

I compiled a new playlist yesterday. Becaue Kathleen often leaves for work after I’ve launched one of the “Bach in Order Playlists, and returned before it ends twelve hours later, she is very familiar with the first and last of Corelli’s Concerti Grossi, Opus 6, but the ten works in between are all but unknown to her. So I thought I’d build yet another list on the set, but this time without any Bach. (Almost; I snuck in my favorite orchestral suite, the fourth.) Designed for weekend use, the list includes agreeable, accessible classics, such as Dvorak’s Symphonic Variations and Rachmaninov’s Second Suite for Two Pianos. So far, it has been very pleasant to listen to, but periodically jarring for me, as I am deeply conditioned to hearing the Corelli embedded in acres of keyboard works by Bach.

***

Late this afternoon, Kathleen and I went to see The Artist, which finally came uptown a few weeks ago — no nearer than 67th Street, but near enough. Kathleen loved it, too. What really interests me is that we both saw it in the same way, naively. We were both gripped by the story of George Valentin’s fall from stardom. That’s not how I saw The Artist the first time, and Kathleen claims that she saw it that way because she’d heard so much about the film that it wasn’t really a first time. We both looked through all the novelties and the references and the amazing artifice. We took note of all that, to talk about afterward, but while the reels were spinning, so to speak, we were watching it as if we’d never seen a movie before. And I think that that is what is great about The Artist: it is not so much a valentine to the movies as a reminder of how to watch a movie. Richard Strauss’s last opera, Capriccio, debates the question, which comes first in opera, the music or the words? (The music, of course!) The Artist asserts that movies are to be watched first and listened to second. How many magnificent moments in talkies don’t involve dialogue! Music and dance, yes, but talking, not so much. I say this despite a religious devotion to the screwball comedies that seem to depend on their crackerjack dialogue to succeed. They don’t, of course; screwballs are always ballets for two actors, dances for wrongheaded lovers. The dialogue ought to be regarded as a part of the original score, written in the clef of Katharine Hepburn, Jean Arthur, and Irene Dunne.

The one thing that hit me just as hard the second time is that Jean Dujardin turns the wearing of clothes into an action. He wears clothes the way Steve McQueen shoots a gun or Sean Connery outfoxes a villain. It’s not an erotic thing; you don’t imagine Jean Dujardin’s body beneath the three-piece suits. But you are aware of a man in the act of wearing — carrying, as the Germans say — three-piece suits. Women do this all the time, but never men. Fred Astaire and Cary Grant don’t wear clothes so much as inhabit them as a species of skin. (When Cary Grant takes off his suit — his one and only outfit — in North by Northwest, it’s almost a kind of disguse, because the real Cary Grant is unimaginable without jacket and trousers. Consider that feathery bathrobe in Bringing Up Baby.)

The first time I saw The Artist, I’d never seen Jean Dujardin before. Now I’ve seen quite a lot, including several movies that I didn’t really understand because they didn’t even have close-captioning to help me follow the French dialogue (Brice de Nice, hilarious even if I didn’t understand everything, or perhaps for that reason). I’ve watched Jean Dujardin win the Oscar for Best Actor and The Artist win Best Picture. Seeing The Artist a second time, I can only thrill to the rightness of everything — not just the awards, but the way in which The Artist disciplines Dujardin’s loose-cannon talent and makes a real man out of him, something that doesn’t seem to have happened in any of the (other) French films that I’ve seen him in. All round, The Artist is a serious work of art, and I was awed by it the second time, not just impressed.

***

After the movie, we walked over to Madison and up to Frank Campbell. The mother of a very old friend of Kathleen’s died the other day, at 92 going on 93, and we arrived at the wake shortly after a large contingent of other old friends of the bereaved had departed — we ran into some of them in the street. The departed lay in an open coffin, so amazingly lifelike that we all expected her to sit up and tell us a racy anecdote — or at least to bid no trump. I couldn’t think what to say, but I had a brainwave: I fell back on the royalty rule. If there was silence, I was fine with it; it was not up to me to decide what to talk about. So I introduced no topics. I said nothing of Jean Zimmerman’s Love, Fiercely, even though the sadness of that book’s final chapters was much on my mind. I didn’t mention Bad News, the Melrose novel by Edward St Aubyn that takes place, in part, at the funeral home where we were sitting (under the name, as I recall, of “Frank McDonald,” moved, for some absolutely inscrutable reason, up a block on Madison to 82nd). Nor did I mention how I collapsed when, for verification purposes only, the lid of my mother’s casket was raised before her wake (she had been ravaged by primitive chemotherapy), or how I almost suffocated on my own sobs, in a torrrent that swept through me like a tornado but left everything undamaged. I understood, in some deep but initial way, that it was not up to me to keep the flow of conversation going. What it was up to me to do was to stand next to Kathleen and join in the spirit of the moment, which was certainly not jovial but also, strangely, not sad. What am I saying. It was terribly, awfully sad. But we were all behaving ourselves, so the sadness was effaced.

The royalty rule is a great idea.

The play that we saw last night, Regrets, by Matt Charman, is set in the bad old days of difficult divorce and political witch hunts: the scene is a cabin colony outside of Reno in 1954. It is also set in the bad old days of Arthur Miller and the attempt to breed a domestic species of tragedy, with the elements of drama retuned for vernacular inarticulateness.  We found it dreary and bleak, and we felt that the actors might have given better performances without Carolyn Cantor’s direction, since the show’s sluggish, heavy feel would be most likely attributable to that. The actors playing the three older men, Brian Hutchinson, Richard Topol, and Lucas Caleb Rooney, seemed as stuck in a flypaper of “notes” as their characters were in the maws of unwanted divorce proceedings. Mr Hutchinson’s character was an annoying puzzle: long since divorced, he was now living in his cabin by choice, writing essay questions for the Chicago Board of Examination and nursing Amfortas-like, unexplained wounds of war. He limped painfully, but it seemed that there must be something more to it than that. We never found out what, though. Mr Rooney played a blowhard ex-sarge, his good nature swamped by the violence unleashed in war, who now had trouble holding down jobs as a store detective. The pathos of this character would have been easier to feel if the acting hadn’t been so unvarnished. Mr Topol, playing the owner of a pet shop in Queens, desperately unhappy about having lost his wife’s love, was best able to chisel a distinctive, unpredictable performance from the material at hand. His tootling on the clarinet near the end brought a much-needed balm of human sweetness to the show, shortly before the climax.

Thank heaven for Adriane Lenox, though. Ms Lenox plays the landlady of the colony, a woman tough enough to impose strict rules on her residency-seeking guests but sensible enough to ease up in a crisis. The creator of the role of the mother in Terrence McNally’s Doubt, she is a truly formidable actress who, without much in the way of distinguished physical presence, can take over the stage with the arch of an eyebrow. I would consider it uncommon good luck to see her at least once every season. Alexis Bledel, who makes her stage debut, comes to us from The Gilmore Girls, so perhaps it’s no surprise that she handled herself very well on stage, in the part of the pretty waif who will do anything to get out of Pyramid Lake.

Looking back, I see Ansel Elgort as the star of the show. He is a high school student (at LaGuardia) who happens also to have danced with City Ballet; now he’s trying out drama, and I know that if anything comes of his career I won’t be shy about boasting that I saw his debut. He was compelling as a remorseful idealist, trying to limit the collateral damage caused by associations that could only be unwise in a moment of Orwellian invasiveness. I don’t think that he had one memorable line as such, but this was very much in character; Mr Elgort used every other physical resource to convey the misery of being a loving young man who’d suddenly become dangerous to talk to. Curt Bouril, playing the agent of understated state oppression, gave his character an off-center, Don-Draperish self-assurance that saved it from caricature.

As usual at MTC Stage I, there was no curtain, so my heart had plenty of time to sink before the show even began. Kathleen thought that the set was neat because it reminded her of camp. Exactly. But Rachel Hauck (sets), Ben Stanton (lights), and Ilona Somogyi (costumes) made the best of a hardscrabble situation. Mr Charman is to be commended, I suppose, for infusing stolid Miller drama with the chill of Beckett’s chasms, and for presenting the concoction in a tidy package; I had the sense throughout of a “well-made play.” Yes, but a well-made play about what?

***

Of all the beautiful things to say:

“I have known one or two women as beautiful,” he said of the bride, “one or two women as interesting, one or two women as spiritual, but for the combination of the three I have never known her equal.”

That’s William Rainsford, the reverend who married Edith Minturn and Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes. There is certainly a good deal of this extraordinariness in Sargent’s portrait.

I lost nearly an hour today to a tangent that (in my mind) ran off from Jean Zimmerman’s lovely book, Love, Fiercely. It was about Shadowbrook, the “largest house in America” at the time that Anson Phelps Stokes, Newton’s father, built it in Stockbridge in the early 1890s. I had to see what was left of this monstrosity of stone and Tudor timber, so I began at Google Maps. Then I Googled “Shadowbrook Stockbridge” and came up with the most interesting document, a history of the house that culminated in its destruction by fire in 1956. By that time, it had been a Jesuit novitiate for decades, and the author was an alumnus, one Frank Shea. Shea turned out to be one of the radical Jesuits who embraced the causes of the Sixties and who indeed left the order and the priesthood to marry someone he’d met (at a Newman Club!), and he seems to have died of a heart attack brought on by a kerfuffle concerning his chancery at Antioch College in the mid-Seventies. Here’s the small-world pearl in the story. Having tired of Shadowbrook (or, better, having come to dislike it after losing his leg in a riding accident), Anson Phelps Stokes built another mansion at Noroton, Connecticut, the very building that, growing up, I knew of simply as “Noroton” — the Sacred Heart academy there.

There was a bit of glitch about loading photographs from the camera onto the All-in-One computer, and in the process of figuring out the problem I had to watch as the contents of my Canon S95’s memory card, which was new in December and from which I have deleted nothing, marched past as they poured into the new base. For the most part, I take two kinds of pictures, one of sidewalks scenes and the other of my grandson, and I usually take several of each at a time. I regarded the street scenes, as they whisked by, with a vague awareness of the shift in seasons, but the shots of Will, playing in his room or in Tompkins Square Park or even at our apartment, had an epic feel, as though they had been shot over many years, centuries perhaps, and not just weeks apart. I’ve taken hundreds of photographs of the neighborhood over the years, registering changes that are generally rather slight, but that day in February when it was so cold, and Will figured out that you wait until the last minute to sit down at the top of a slide — there won’t be another one of those. The juxtaposition was unsettling. The three months of everyday walking about partook of a different order of time from the three months of Will’s proceeding from two years of age to two years and a quarter, and I felt physically tightened and stretched by the camera’s indifferent shift between the timelines.

Something else that’s completely new to human experience is the touch screen. I say this not because I’m particularly wowed by my iPad, my Kindle Fire, or my HTC Inspire. I say it because I’m stunned every time I watch Will swipe his way to the episode of Kipper that he wants to see. There is no fiddling around; he knows exactly what he’s doing. Even though his complete sentences are rudimentary and his work with colored pens and pencils little more than scribbling, he handles the iPad pretty much the way I do. His little hands move with adult dispatch. Please don’t think that I’m bragging; I suspect that any reasonably bright kid who has been playing with an iPad from a tender age (3 months in Will’s case) will display the same facility. What’s surprising is the expertise. The touch screen clearly unleashes a skill set that we didn’t know about, because there was no way for a child to express it. Or perhaps it does no such thing. Perhaps what makes the touch screen unlike all the other switches in life is that it transparently overlays the objects to which it leads. You don’t move a mouse over here to bring up a screen over there. You touch the screen itself and there it is. It’s just like opening a drawer — something that Will is almost as good at doing. (Touch screens are so easy!)

A hundred years ago, there were no Kipper episodes to watch. Then we went through a long period where adults had to stage-manage such entertainments, by powering and loading devices, from phonographs and radios to DVD players. Now the little ones can do everything all by themselves. Will no longer says “More?” when a show comes to an end. He hops off his seat (assuming that his face is not already half an inch from the screen) and swipes away. And I shiver: he will never remember not having an iPad.

***

It’s late, and I’m not going to write about the play that we saw this evening, Matt Charman’s Regrets, at MTC; that can wait. I simply want to notice a charming book that I picked up yesterday, Love, Fiercely, Jean Zimmerman’s book about the subjects of one of John Singer Sargent’s more remarakable paintings, Mr and Mrs Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes, which, unlike the painting in Erica Hirshler’s Sargent’s Daughters, hangs in the American Wing galleries at the Museum, where, I tell friends and visitors, I keep my good stuff. Edith Minturn Stokes is perhaps the first unmistakably American woman of style to appear in a painting, and it’s no accident that, in her Sargent portrait, she is dressed in wealthy America’s contribution to high fashion, “sportswear.” She had, earlier, posed for Daniel Chester French’s monumental (but impermanent) sculpture for the Chicago World’s Fair, The Republic , and job that she got, so to speak, on the strength of her apparently riveting performances in swank tableaux vivants. I didn’t know about any of that until I read it in Zimmerman’s book, and I’m prepared for further surprises. Edith and her husband were very much in love when they married, late, at the age of 28, and they were still in love when they lost all their money in the Crash, or something like that — I haven’t got that far. Mr Phelps Stokes was a committed, arguably obsessive antiquarian in the field of New York City history, a hobby horse that I believe also contributed to the couple’s financial reverses. Stay tuned for corrections. Jean Zimmerman writes very well, if a little too imaginatively for my taste (but what’s a biographer to do, confronted by respectable families that revered the ban on committing important things to writing), and I’m tickled by the sense that a new corner of Gotham is being opened up to me.

Yesterday, I had two computers in the blue room, each with two monitors. Today, I still have two computers, but one of them has three screens. The other, older one, will be decomissioned as soon as possible. I was tired of looking at the back of the monitors on a writing table facing out into the room, and I was also tired of Vista, the operating system on the older computer.

It took five hours to move what we moved, and even then I forgot, somehow, about ZoomBrowser, the app for viewing Canon images. Something to look forward to, and, in the meantime, a new way to allow images to proliferate without organization.

Jason Mei did all the real work as usual, but I was on my feet most of the time, looking for things and thinking aloud and really too restless to sit down, so I was exhausted by dinnertime. It would have been nice to chat with Kathleen after dinner, but she wanted to get some work done and was happy to do it now that Jason had upgraded the WiFi drivers on her laptop. So I drifted into the blue room, where Jason (now remote) awed me with pictures of multi-screen arrays, such as this one with 24 screens and another, which I’m sure must be in Germany, with an assortment of ten, if you include the iPad. Then there were the cool graphic displays, both on three screens, of some exciting city (Shanghai? Seattle?) and a baroque town square, respectively. But the one that really caught my fancy, with five screens, was a beautiful array of DOS commands. I have to have something like that, displayed on my three screens, that combines computer operations with Twitteer feeds. Not a screen saver, but a screen show.