Looking back, I see that George Dyson gives, at the opening of Turing’s Cathedral, his “history of the digital universe, a fair warning of where he’s headed.

At 10:38 PM on March 3, 1953, in a one-story brick building at the end of Olden Lane in Princeton, New Jersey, Italian Norwegian mathematical biologist Nils Aall Barricelli inoculated a 3-kilobyte digital universe with random numbers generated by drawing playing cards from a shuffled deck… “with the aim of verifying the possibility of an evolution similar to that of living organisms taking place in an aritificially created universe.

But only in retrospect. Only much later, in this book that feels so much longer than it is, do we see why a story that seems at times infatuated with the Central European mathematical wizards, largely from Budapest, who were driven to the United States by Hitler’s insanity, and equally infatuated by the place to which they were driven, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton — only near the end do we see why such a story begins with a relatively eccentric figure who spent little time at the IAS and who, were a movie to be made of Turing’s Cathedral, would have to be played by John Tuturro.

As for the title, it’s a shibboleth. Either you get it or you don’t. I expect that a reference to Darwin’s Cathedral, by David Sloan Wilson, but, as I haven’t read that book, I can’t make more sense of it than that. All that’s certain is Turing’s Cathedral is not about Alan Turing.

***

I discern at least three different books within the covers of this one. Three different kinds of books, books having little to do with one another even where nominal subject matter overlaps. The first book is a scrapbook of the early days of the IAS, which, you won’t be surprised to learn, George Dyson grew up, as his father, Freeman, had migrated to Princeton before he was born. We meet a lot of interesting characters and we hear a lot of interesting founding stories, all about the Institute. We meet Alice Rockafellow, who managed the cafeteria. Even when the anecdotes are engaging, the overall tone is that of a rather dreary institutional history, written to the anniversary of something. Individuals flash alive for a moment or two, but IAS itself is just a building — Fuld Hall.

Long before Dyson is done with this story, however, he picks up another one, and proceeds to tell it backwards. This is the story of John von Neumann and the bomb. The bomb was always the thermonuclear device that we call the “hydrogen bomb”; the “atomic bomb” that was dropped on Hiroshima (and then again on Nagasaki), was no more than the detonator of the intended bomb, which could not be designed without the aid of electronic computers. That’s why the story of computers is a postwar story: the blasts that took Japan out of the War suggested that von Neumann and others were on the right track, weapons-wise, and that the government ought to fund the development of the computer that they claimed to need in order to build a proper thermonuclear device. If this thumbnail is mistaken or misleading, it’s no thanks to Dyson, about whom I can only say that the grain of his sense of organization is very unlike my own.  

The third book is about life, self-replication, and who’s in charge, men or computers? Dyson is coy about the nonfictional nature of his ostensible science fiction. He even sets it forth in a bit of dialogue, over lunch with the 91 year-old Edward Teller, to whom he proposes the following:

My own personal theory is that extraterrestial life could be here already … and how would we necessarily know? If there is life in the universe, the form of life that will prove to be most successful at propogating itsself will be digital life; it will adopt a form that is independent of the local chemistry, and migrate from one place to another as in electromagnetic signal, as long as there’s a digital world — a civilization that has discovered the Universal Turing Machine — for it to colonize when it gets there. And thats why von Neumann and you other Martians got us to build all those computers, to create a home for this kind of life.

Teller gnomically urges Dyson to present this as science fiction. You can almost see the other wizards in the room turning their signet rings in a propitious direction. This is where Barricelli comes in. (Do we have something of a record here for the shortest Wikipedia entry?) I suspect that Dyson’s three books would cohere somewhat better on a second reading, but I’m firm about their remaining three different books.

***

I realize that we’ve been having an unseasonably warm spring — Willy, the barber, is worried about temperatures breaking a hundred during May — my junkets to the Shake Shack have not been kissed by atmospheric clemency. Last week, it was windy and freezing, ditto the week before. Today, the air was milder, but it rained. It rained just enough for me to tuck the NYRB inside my jacket whilst continuing stolidly with my lunch.

***

Will Thomas Kinkade’s untimely death catch serious writers about art unprepared? Anyone who has sympathetically toured a collection of Old Master paintings lately will understand instantly that Kinkade’s output was not “art.” But what is it, then? Is it not art because it’s not good enough (a matter of degree — in Kinkade’s enormously lucrative case, of calculated “errors” intended to snare the unsophisticated — or is it not art because it is something else, something that could exist only in an age of affluence, when materials could be wasted without consequence. (The unsophisticated buyers of art, two centuries ago, were few and far between, and highly unlikely to indulge their own native tastes. They’d buy what their nearest betters bought.) In Kinkade’s case, the materials are doubly wasted: the paint and so forth, and then the buyers’ money. No one will want Kinkades in ten or twenty years, because kitsch, like forgery, is stuck to its own time in a way that great painting is not. The paintings, far from rare as it is, will become curiosities in which only a small group of fans will be interested. (Unless, of course, the Idiocracy scenario plays out.)

I’m inclined to the latter view: kitsch as a personal accessory, like an expensive handbag. Hanging over the living room sofa, the painting of a country chapel, lights aglow in the early dusk, is a sign to those granted entry.  In this, I would venture to say (having forgotten everything that I ever knew about semiotics), it is unlike the expensive handbag, about which there will always hang a bit of mystery (why pay so much for a purse, and why that particular sack?). Status markers flirt with the danger of the emperor’s new clothes; sometimes, especially at the low end of the price range, the material value of a status object is nil. Signs are unambiguous (even if there’s more to them than first impression reveals). A Kinkade on the wall says: “We’re pious Americans who maintain family values. Because it would be rude to insist on this point by affixing a literal statement to the wall, we have chosen this painting to convey the message.” As something to look at, a Kinkade can only be a point of departure, a seeder of recollection and wishful thinking that carries the owner/viewer to an inner space.

And can’t precisely the same be said of the work of Damien Hirst, for all that he operates at the very opposite pole of the art market?

Friday

My grandson was very happy to interrupt a conversation that I was having with his mother this morning, but he didn’t see the need to say anything once he took possession of the telephone. “So,” I suggested, “Do you want me to do all the talking?” “YES!” he barked. We’ll see how long that lasts. Ray Soleil has taken to doing me a great favor: getting me used to being addressed as “Old man.” For the moment, Will still calls me Dadoo.

***

Last evening, I watched The Prince and the Showgirl, and then My Week With Marilyn, the recent movie about the making of The Prince and the Showgirl. I was keen to take the fullest possible measure of the two impersonations. The earlier movie, which I had somehow never seen, was surprisingly more pleasant than I expected it to be, and never have I seen Monroe look more gloriously yet at the same time simply beautiful.

In fact there are three impersonations, and let me say right away that it was much more agreeable to understand what Judi Dench was saying (in her role as the dowager queen of Carpathia) than to struggle with Sybil Thorndike’s strange accent. When she spoke French, she was far more comprehensible.

As for the principals, I had thought, after seeing My Week With Marilyn in the theatre, that Kenneth Branagh did a stupendous job of impersonating Laurence Olivier, but I came away from The Prince and the Showgirl convinced that it was Olivier who impersonated Branagh, avant la lettre as I put it the other day. My judgment of Michelle Williams stands: she shows up Marilyn Monroe. Williams is a great actress, disiciplined down to the slightest frisson. Marilyn Monroe was, or behaved like, a model and a celebrity who could not be troubled to do the hard work of acting. She knew that she didn’t have to, really, in order to be a star, but I expect that she would have had a happier life if she had not felt privileged to lay back.

And Michelle Williams is genuinely sexy. When she leaned in to kiss Eddie Redmayne — well, I thought what it means to be happily married. In the end, Williams can’t do a really credible Monroe because what she really can’t do — what would have been so much more obvious if Monroe hadn’t dyed her hair — is Betty Boop. But she’s so personally gorgeous that, instead of impersonating Marilyn Monroe, she redeems her.

Saturday

I wonder why I am always tired, but then I consider: I am always busy. Unless I am reading, I am working at something. Set aside my activities here, and there’s t of housekeeping tasks, which arrange themselves in two companies. The first is the roster of everyday jobs, such as washing the dishes and making the bed, and the regular jobs that recur at greater intervals, such as arranging for the laundry and changing the sheets on the bed. I try to shop for food every day; it’s still more accurate to say, alas, that I try never to shop for tomorrow or the next day. The unthinking rhythm with which these obligations can be dispatched goes a long way to determining the day’s happiness.

Then there is the other company, comprised of strangers as it were, projects that arise no more often than once a year, or perhaps only once and for all. Library management probably oughtn’t to fall into this company, but it does seem to; instead of being managed by a steady, conscientious librarian, my collection of books is in the hands of a series of ferocious Turkish sultans who, once they have taken over and reorganized everything, give the bookshelves no further attention, until at long last their negligence leads to insupportable conditions and a new coup is compassed. Then there are the projects that, in one’s twenties, one thinks of as “getting organized”; in one’s sixties (or later), they reek so strongly of mortality that they are virtual amulets that ward off death. As long as you are diligently preparing to “leave your affairs in order,” your life will be spared. Or so you feel, even if you see right through it.

The two companies dance in a complicated round, following steps that it takes, or at least has taken me, many years to learn. Almost every day, I suffer a moment of regret: why is it all coming into place now? That is one. The other is this, felt almost as a child feels it: now it is time to go to bed.

***

Yesterday — in the evening mostly — I read Elizabeth Taylor’s last novel, Blaming. I read it almost whole, almost all of it — all but ten or so pages — in the one day. It’s true that it’s not very long. It has something of the power of a great novella, such as The Heart of Darkness. This, one can hardly pretend not to think, must owe something to the fact that Taylor knew that she was dying (of cancer) as she worked on the book, and especially as she prepared it for publication. There are two deaths in the novel; one happens almost immediately, just far enough into the book to be perfectly shocking. The art with which Taylor averts your attention from its impending is immediately gratifying. The other occurs near the end, after the story threatens to have petered out. This second death is not shocking at all, but it creates a puzzlement that perhaps troubles the reader more than the characters. One closes the book in a storm of aesthetic and moral uncertainty. This, too, is brought off with great artistry.

And yet Blaming is often as funny as anything, especially where children are concerned. But I find that there is almost nothing that I can say of Blaming that isn’t in the nature of a spoiler. I shall have to write about it elsewhere. For the moment, I’ll simply point out that I’m glad that it was the fifth Taylor novel that I read, and not the first or the second. Just as one would not want to read Persuasion before Pride and Prejudice. (And I think that Persuasion is a very great novel, perhaps Austen’s finest; but there are those who do not.) If had to pick two out of the five titles, I’d say that the other indispensible one, and the one to read first, would be The View of the Harbour, which I read last. But they’re all marvelous. I’ve heard Angel referred to as Taylor’s masterpiece, but it is in effect a sport, a recreation, quite unlike the other books that I’ve read. But this kind of list-making, which I’m clearly indulging because I can’t write about Blaming, is foolish. It’s time to get breakfast.

Monday

A scene of what felt like maximal disorder: all the dishes from yesterday’s dinner, and all the window areas in disarray — the handyman came this morning, as scheduled, to change the HVAC filters. I should have liked nothing better than to spend the day in bed, finishing up various books, but, no, that was definitely not to be. As of this writing, the rooms have been restored and the second of three dishwasher loads is running. I’ve washed the wine glasses, but not the water glasses. My moving parts are moving very slowly.

It was a day worthy of all the preparation and cleanup.

Here’s how I roasted the ham: I cored a pineapple and lay rings along the bottom of the roasting pan. Then I sat the cut edge of the ham atop the rings and poured maple syrup all over the rind. I put the pan in a slow oven and basted the ham every twenty minutes. I’m not sure what, if anything, this procedure contributed to the flavor, but it was the best-tasting ham that I’ve ever had, with a tenderness that I can only call bready. (As in very good bread.)

We had a salmon mousse to start with, alongside a “beet and scallion appetizer” from the original New York Times Cook Book that turned out to be beet borscht without the broth and minus the puréeing. Then a mushroom bouillon that was wrecked, I think, by the port wine reduction that went in at the last minute. The ham came with riced sweet potatoes and steamed asparagus. For dessert, a perfect angel-food cake, with a raspberry coulis.

***

While attending to the HVAC filter in the living room, the handyman inadvertently dsiconnected the cable connected the iPod dock to the stereo amplifier. Huge electronic farts filled the air until they unaccountably stopped. I turned on the Nano that happened to be the dock, but could hear nothing; I made a mental note to begin find the disconnection before moving furniture back into place.

I forgot that I’d turned on the Nano, though, and was very surprised to hear the beginning of the long last movement of Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony. It wasn’t what I’d have chosen to listen to at that particular moment, but I was happy to go along with it. Then, suddenly, inbstead of diving into one of those chasms that precedes the glorious finale, the symphony gave way to the piano introduction to one of Rossini’s droller songs. Nobody expects the iPod shuffle! When I was done with everything that I absolutely had to do, and could sit down for a minute with a cup of tea, I went to the playlist that includes the Resurrection and went back to where I ought to have been.

I was reading Adam Gopnik on Albert Camus, in The New Yorker, and very absorbed by the essay. But not so absorbed that I didn’t have to put it down for last few dozen bars of Mahler.

My subject this morning is the somewhat rebarative one of feeds. “Feeds” is an ancient news term that signifies the contents of reports, formerly received by the newsroom in teletype form, from various news services, such as the Associated Press and Reuters. The clatter of the teletype machines was so completely the music of broadcast journalism that it was often used as a theme to introduce news programs. The machines printed the reports on fanfold paper, basically a very, very long strip of cheap foolscap pleated in 11-inch folds and packed in a corrugated box. In my early radio days, I found it was quaint and charming to type letters on fanfold paper; happily, most of this juvenilia will have crumbled to dust by now.

Do you remember how, back in the Eighties and Nineties, before personal computing achieved the look and feel that has stabilized over the past fifteen years, computer keyboards clattered intriguingly whenever a character (usually a detective or his proxy) had to sit down and use one? Sometimes the operating systems were equally fantastic. Compare Outland with Copycat — and remember that Outland was set in the future.

The thrill of the teletype racket was that something was happening, something with an industrial feel: news was being produced! Whether you were paying attention or not, reams of news poured forth from the shaky platens. Today’s personal computers are somewhat disappointing in this regard. Oh, they’re always doing plenty of things that you can’t see, and wouldn’t want to see; but to you, the user, they appear to be doing nothing but waiting for you to type in the next instruction, and this creates an unpleasant lonely feeling. We’re all so connected, as they say, but that’s not what it feels like.

Reading feeds on Google Reader would be much more pleasant if they added the chug of the old teletype machines as a personal option. By providing the cascade of incoming updates with an aural signal, the reader, thus improved, would probably reassure us on some hunter-gatherer level, instead of leaving us feeling woefully snuck-up-upon. There needs to be compensation for the fact that the news service that provides your reader with feeds is something that has to be cobbled together by you. You have to decide whether or not to “subscribe” to each and every blog that might or might not prove to be interesting over time. I subscribe to about 150 blogs (I guess). Every time one of the blogs to which I subscribe sprouts a new entry, a corresponding feed is noted (by a number in parenthesis) on the subscription list at the left side of the pane. When the total number of feeds that I haven’t looked at exceeds a thousand, the application stops counting, so that it can take quite a while, on Monday mornings, to bring the total below “1000+”. Quite a demoralizing while.

Yesterday, I spent several hours glancing through feeds. I tried very hard not to read any; the idea was to make up my mind about interesting stories on a quick, intuitive basis, leaving the reading and sifting and thinking for later. Later, meaning today, I will peruse the “starred items” on the iPad, spending several more hours but in a completely different mental atmosphere. In terms of Daniel Kahneman’s fast and slow thinking, I’m dividing the Type 1 jobs from the Type 2 jobs. Whether I’m any good at this remains to be seen.

It’s a pity that feeds aren’t more uniform. Many feeds completely reproduce the blog entry that the reader application is reporting. I believe that, if you set your reader to “subscribe” to this site, there won’t be any need to visit, because the reader will give you the entire content, complete with image. What it won’t give you is the formatting; as a rule, feeds are harder to read. That’s why I recommend subscribing to The Daily Blague, where the entries are rarely more than two sentences long and a link is provided to the full text here. Brief feeds are always best, precisely because they don’t invite you to linger. Flag or don’t flag, but keep moving.

I also wish that Google Reader were more adjustable. Or that there were a comparable app with a (reasonable) pricetag that would allow me to manage feeds more effectively. Take those “starred items,” for example. There’s no way to remove the stars in batches, resulting in the pile-up of dead information. (It’s inconceivable that archeologists of the future will ever tackle the the middens of our discarded choices.) I try to remove the star of every item that I “use” in putting the Beachcombing entry together, but if you ask me I oughtn’t to have to make the effort. Where’s all this automation that we hear so much about?

As to why I bother to read feeds, that’s an entirely different matter. I can’t possibly bear to think about the experience of reading feeds, which is what I’ve tried to do here, and the reason(s) for reading them at the same time — it’s too crushing.

***

Every once in a while, a great treat pops up in the feeds — something both delightful and unexpected. I was lucky enough to have such a treat yesterday. I was glancing over the feeds for Nigeness, a blog kept by an English gentleman of a certain age who works in London (in the City, presumably, but this is not discussed) and who lives in Surrey somewhere (or in a neighboring county). Nige is fond of long walks, and he’s a keen amateur lepidopterist — how nice for today’s butterflies it must be, to live in an age of digital capture. Yesterday’s treat was encountered on one of Nige’s less beaten paths, and involved the very British humor of Berlin-born Gerard Hoffnung. I knew all about the Hoffnung “music festivals,” but I didn’t know a thing about his fake radio interviews, when he would put on his “bufferish” act, impersonating a blitheringly self-important twit twice his actual age. I’ll let Nige himself tell you the rest; click through to YouTube from there. Prepare to weep.

Here is Elizabeth Taylor, in a novel published in 1947. (A lady novelist is taking the train to London, to see her publisher — also a woman.)

“A man,” she thought suddenly, “would consider this a business outing. But, then, a man would not have to cook the meals for the day overnight, nor consign his child to a friend, nor leave half-done the ironing, nor forget the grocery order as I now discover I have forgotten it. The artfulness of men,” she thought. “They implant in us, foster in us, instincts which it is to their advantage for us to have, and which, in the end, we feel shame at not possessing.” She opened her eyes and glared with scorn at a middle-aged man reading a newspaper.

“A man like that,” she thought, “a worthless creature, obviously; yet so long has his kind lorded it that I (who, if only I could have been ruthless and single-minded about my work as men are, could have been a good writer) feel slightly guilty at not being back at the kitchen sink.”

The extraordinary dispatch of this passage made me sit right up when I read it last night. I wonder how many male readers did so in 1947. Perhaps there was a bit of squirming, but shock would have been unlikely. Any men caught reading Elizabeth Taylor in those days would have been, presumably, at least mildly sympathetic to the charge of “lording it”; and meanwhile he would take full advantage of the fun that Taylor has at the expense of her character, who could have been a good writer. For it is also the case that this woman is a terrible home-maker. Her husband, indeed, is — but never mind about that.

No, the cause of feminism was not much advanced by this kind of writing. Outrage was required. Not the kind of outrage that, for the moment, convulses our glaring novelist on the train, but the kind of outrage that won’t stand for books with such titles as The Female Eunuch. I blush to think how brazenly I carried Germaine Greer’s book around with me, back in my early radio days, oblivious of the offense that it gave, simply as a mere unopened object. I blush, but not so deeply, at the recollection of being repulsed by the unshaven legs of the more advanced women. Outrage! That’s what it takes to get people thinking.

***

After a few hours of longreads, and then editorially deciding what to do with them, I felt that what I needed after all that hard work was a nice walk in the park. This was unusual: my typical response to a bout of hard work is prostration, not restlessness. Chalk it up to spring. The day wasn’t as warm and balmy as advertised; I almost came down with pneumonia at the Shake Shack, nibbling my frozen fries with childblained fingers. Later in the afternoon, when I took my walk, it was more pleasant, but still pretty blustery. I walked down to the park thinking what a waste of time it was, but enjoying myself helplessly anyway. I took a lot of pictures, mostly of utterly familiar views. I’ve been walking to Carl Schurz Park for over thirty years, and there was absolutely nothing new and different about the place yesterday — except, of course, for the sheer yesterday-ness, which was imperishably distinctive, even if it’s entirely beyond my powers to say why. Chalk &c.

On the way home, I stopped in at Fairway to buy one or two things for a shrimp risotto, which I made for dinner a few hours later. It had been a while since my last risotto, and I detected an edge of sawdust in the old rice. (Kathleen claimed not to notice it.) How nice it would be to ask at a counter, which I can remember doing as a very small child, to ask for small quantities of things. I would buy a half cup of arborio as needed. How grand it would be to live without bottles of herbs and spices, but instead to buy tiny packets of them whenever needed.

Until I sat down at the computer just now, my head was brimming with interesting ideas, but they all wilted by the screen’s early light. I was going to mention that both George Dyson and Jonathan Haidt, authors of big , thick books that I’ve been reading, believe that human evolution has been occurring at a rate much, much faster than even such recent scientists as Stephen Jay Gould proposed. Dyson writes about “lateral gene transfer” as though it were a readily available lunch special. Haidt asserts that “religions and righteous minds had been coevolving, culturally and genetically, for tens of thousands of years before the Holocene era.” (Haidt also tips me off to the likely inspiration for Dyson’s title.) I’m more than inclined to agree; I’m convinced that human brains have undergone material changes since the Protestant Reformation — some human brains, anyway. I believe that the consciousness that we experience today was unknown before the Fifteenth Century.

So I’ve gone ahead and mentioned all of that, but in the process I’ve exhausted my ability to discuss it. I was about to say that the two books have little in common, but I suspect that that’s wrong; the books merely seem to differ sharply because The Righteous Mind is so painstakingly organized, while Turing’s Cathedral seems designed for random access. I have no idea why Dyson arranged his chapters in what seems to me to be reverse sequential order, but I understand that his penchant for telling stories is what makes him an incoherent historian, endlessly back-and-forthing among the years between the late Thirties and the middle Fifties. Whatever Alan Turing is doing in the title, the pre-eminent theme of the book is the life and thought of John von Neumann, the Hungarian-born charismatic polymath who by sheer force of personality organized the teams that created the hydrogen bomb. (The Manhattan Project, we learn, was really only a stage in the larger project.) The second theme — and it’s very distracting in a book involving so much advanced engineering and mathematics — is the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. This is where Dyson grew up; his father, Freeman, was a professor at the IAS. Too many of the stories that Dyson tells belong in a scrap-book. Once these themes recede, in the final quarter of the book, Turing’s Cathedral becomes more intellectually intriguing, and I’m not sure that you have to have read the earlier chapters to enjoy them.

It occurred to me that somebody really ought to write a book called Mathematics for Novelists. This book would explain, as lucidly as possible, the things that interest mathematicians, but, more than that, it would convey a sense of their attraction to such things. Why does anybody care about sets? I’ve never understood. What is so pressing about David Hilbert’s Entscheidungsproblem, and why does it matter that Kurt Gödel solved it? Writers like Dyson assume that the allure of these issues is self-evident, but it’s not.

***

A View of the Harbour, Elizabeth Taylor’s third novel, took a while to capture my undivided interest, but it did so round about a passage that I want to mention for an entirely different reason — that’s to say, not as indication of the novel’s excellence. And before I get to that, here’s something that I just read a moment ago: “Detail entrances a child and warms his imagination and at school there is a dearth of detail, so that the imagination loses its glow and often dies.” So true — about the dearth of detail at school. Schools abound in three or four kinds of things — desks, hallways, posters, irritating lighting fixtures — but are deserts otherwise.

As to the earlier passage, I’m just going to jump in.

He looked out at the harbour from her front window and found all the buildings arranged differently. From here — for the foreshore curved slightly — the Cazabons’ house stood forward, a square stone house built, said Bertram, about seventeen-forty, its slates tucking down under a parapet … and two front windows so as to save the tax (Lily had sometimes wondered why); this curiosity did not extend merely to those who now lived in the house but to the ones who had built it and all those who had gone in through its front door in so many different kinds of clothes from seventeen-forty onwards.

This view of life was novel to Lily, who had always thought of the past in two sections — what seemed to her to be living memory, and then the great stretch of darkness behind that curtain which had come down so finally, so sharply-dividing on January the first, nineteen-hundred. Now, people began to peek through this curtain at her, and she found herself wondering about them.

What we have here is nothing less than the dawn, presented with Taylor’s offhand but amazing concision, of historical consciousness, together with an image that illustrates in everyday terms what historical consciousness feels like: it is the sense of “all those who had gone in through its front door in so many different kinds of clothes.” I believe that Lily’s previously limited understanding of the past occludes most people’s view of the future as well: beyond the lives of grandchildren, the imagination falters. Of course, we can’t foresee what the clothes will look like a hundred years hence with anything like the accuracy of our grasp of what they looked like a hundred years ago, but it helps to have a sense of change.

Now I’ll say something about the novel itself: I’ve been imagining it in a staged adaptation. Almost everything takes place in or before the houses on the front of a seaside village, and it’s easy to imagine the deft lighting of scrims opening up now this interior and now that to show the various lives that Taylor has collected under her microscope. This isn’t to say that I’d like to see a staged version of A View of the Harbour (a view from the harbor, it would be), only that the synesthesia of novel-reading and theatre-going is a pleasure in itself.

Where was the sun this weekend, when we might have enjoyed it more? Well, here it is, this fine Monday morning, as if to mock us.

Blasting has been announced, to begin this week. Something to look forward to. Ray Soleil was recollecting what it was like to be in a chandelier showroom when the LIRR-Grand Central tube was under construction: a lot of tinkling. I note that that connecting tunnel is not yet in use. I wonder if I will live to use the Second Avenue subway. Seriously, I do. 2017 is a ways off.

Here’s the amusing part of the blasting: all surface transportation is blocked for the duration of each the eight daily blasts. The blasts are expected to last for only a minute, but a lot of people, not to mention cars, accumulate at our busy intersection in that time. I expect that tenants will be unable to leave our building during these exciting moments. Or we’ll be stranded outside Fairway, laden with groceries. It’s all very jolly — great summer fun.

Ray, with his great sense of humor, assures me that the MTA will run out of money before the new line is completed, “just like the last time.”

A lot of good the sunny weather is doing today! Welcome to spring!

***

Ah, here’s something good. Bill Keller has his doubts about hate crimes. So do I, especially after reading The Righteous Mind. It would be interesting to see Jonathan Haidt’s analysis of the inspiration behind hate-crime legislation. The biggest nugget of wisdom that I draw from his book is that the moral foundations of liberalism are skimpier than those of conservatism, and that three of the conservative foundations, which he labels Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity, are actually repugnant to many liberals, especially the WEIRD ones (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic). Hate-crime legislation might be said to punish the expression of conservative morality in any criminal context, while at the same time mounting a corrective reflection, asserting that liberals have positive ideas of their own about Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity. It is difficult for me to see hate-crime legislation as anything but unseemly spite.

In any case, I hope that Keller’s sentiment about the Tyler Clementi case — “It’s not a great reach to say that Ravi faces up to 10 years in prison for being a jerk.” — finds its way into plenty of amicus briefs filed in support of Dharun Ravi.

Keller’s Op-Ed piece is part of the Times‘s triple-headed appraisal of the Trayvon Martin case; the only thing missing from the two-page report and the two opinion pieces (David Carr writes the other) is how this story about a fatal nighttime scuffle between two strangers in Florida came to merit coverage by the nation’s newspaper of record. At some point, I hope, the Times will print a little time-line tracing the development of the story on the Internet, capturing key moments at Twitter, such as Spike Jones’s notorious (and utterly inexcusable) posting what he thought was George Zimmerman’s home address. How did Spike Jones know about what happened to a teenager in Florida? What I’d really like to see, of course, is a payoff in the form of repealing the Stand Your Ground legislation that has made it impossible for the police to arrest George Zimmerman. Permissive gun laws correspond, as spiteful overreach, to hate-crime laws. The United States desperately needs a conservative rebuttal, based solidly on appeals to loyalty, authority, and sanctity, to the National Rifle Association. The Righteous Mind makes it clear (not that it wasn’t already pretty clear) that no amount of liberal squawking is ever going to advance the cause of gun control.

¶ Here’s a fascinating little video about robots that reminds us how important it is to sit down and think through the problem of jobs for people. These little Kiva fellows are doing work that no human being ought to be asked to do for an extended period, much less a career, so they’re not the problem. Ask yourself: why is there no national chain, no McDonald’s, of dry cleaners? What can we learn from that? (kottke.org; 3/29)

¶ Tony Judt’s widow, Jennifer Homans, writes that “ideas were a kind of emotion” for her husband, and what better evidence of this could we have than his determination to continue working through the ravages of ALS. This is what enabled Judt’s humanism to prevail over his intellectuality. (NYRB; 3/5) ¶ Kevin Hartnett is inspired by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s thoughts about colonialism and the “single story” to translate the concept to family dynamics. (The Millions; 3/8)

All parents tell single stories about their kids and all kids wish they didn’t. Single stories are the principle reason that, eventually, kids become so eager to leave home — they want to escape the simple narratives told about them since they were born, to jar their parents into recognizing that they’re no longer (and maybe never were) the person they were made out to be when they were eight years old.

¶ Richard Wolin visits China and delivers lectures on the impact of the Cultural Revolution upon French intellectuals. Quite aside from negotiating the tricky political implications of his scholarship, Wolin is disappointed by mindless modernizing. “I traveled to China in search of otherness and cultural difference, only to discover how homogenous and uniform the world has become.” (LARB; via 3 Quarks Daily; 3/16) ¶ Benjaming Fong, a scholar at Columbia, argues that the only way to keep the world from degenerating into Hannah Arendt’s “heap of things” is to conduct the Freudian psychoanalytic conversation. (NYT; via 3 Quarks Daily; 3/20) ¶ At The Crux, Julie Sedivy reports on the work of linguist William Labov, which suggests an interesting link between regional pronunciation and political alignment in the “Inland North.” (3/28) ¶ John Lanchester, I’ll bet, never expected to become the financial expert that he has become. He wouldn’t be so fresh if he did. What Marx got right and wrong, at 193. (LRB; via The Awl; 3/29)

¶ Benjamin Wallace considers TED, noting that the conferences founder, Richard Saul Wurman, plans new conferences in the original TED’s spirit, less packaged and high-minded than Chris Anderson’s curation. We think that Wurman is on the right traack: the only guests will be the speakers. (New York; via MetaFilter; 3/1) Wallace writes,

Until recently, the universal self-­actualizing creative ambition was to write a novel. Everyone has a novel in them, it was said. Now the fantasy has changed: Everyone has a TED Talk in them.

¶ Jonah Lehrer explains why the brain’s capacity for the subconscious parallel processing of massive amounts of data makes our emotions more reliable than our reasoned recollections. (Frontal Cortex; 3/2) ¶ Tim Requarth and Meehan Crist, however, argue that Mr Lehrer has gone too far in the claims about “creativity” (which, we agree, is an awfully nebulous portmanteau) in Imagine. (The Millions; 3/27) ¶ Laura McKenna casts a gimlet eye upon the Pinterest phenomenon. “We may never make that bucolic scene a reality, but in the meantime, Pinterest is making big money off letting adults play make-believe.” (GOOD; 3/5) ¶ Whatever you do, don’t go whining to Felix Salmon about the cost of living in New York City. It’s “the ultimate in parochialism.” (3/6) ¶ Speaking of reasons and emotions — well, you can’t, and Sam McNerny explains why (in case you hadn’t guessed) at Why We Reason (he’ll have to come up with a new title now!). “Reason” and “emotion” are ancient concepts, conceived in utter ignorance of neurology. But they’re hardily planted in our minds, and they’re proved to be helpful in explaining what neuroscientists are discovering about memory, decision-making, and so on. Now we’re on notice that, since neither reason nor emotion actually exists in the mind, the words are just as likely to skew our understanding. (via The Browser; 3/8) ¶ Alex Engebretson appreciates the thought of Marilynne Robinson, while noting that it takes no notice of intellectual trends emerging after her undergraduate days. Also:

She includes almost zero references to TV, movies, Facebook, celebs, or anything to do with pop culture. Her lonesome distance from the mainstream is eccentric, but it’s also what gives her essays their strange power to diagnose America’s discontents.

Indeed. (The Millions; 3/16) ¶ Flight simulator for the sociable soul: reading fiction really does exercise the brain, which, according to Annie Murphy Paul, “ does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated.” (NYT; 3/19)

¶ For those of you who persist in regarding Harvard as some kind of school, Yves Smith has a bridge for sale. (Naked Capitalism; 3/5) ¶ Worst US President ever? Just what we thought: Andrew Jackson. Akim Reinhardt has good reason to leave a trail of tears. (3 Quarks Daily; 3/12) ¶ Felix Salmon makes us wonder: does the term “banking client” make sense? How did it come about that everyone expected banks to act altruistically? On the other hand, perhaps they ought to. (3/16) ¶ How do you feel about Mike Daisey “improving” a few anecdotes for his powerful, anti-Apple theatre piece, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs? Some people, it appears, believe that Daisey is to be saddled with the responsibilities of a journalist. We should have thought that it was enough that his monologue inspire real journalists to go after the story. We’re afraid, then, that Jen Paton seems to us to be confused. (3 Quarks Daily; 3/19) ¶ Ian McEwan writes (or speaks) with characteristic fluency about the drive to be first, experienced (to their surprise) by both Darwin and Einstein; and about the elegance exhibited by novel theories that find rapid acceptance. In short: the art of science. (Guardian; via Cosmic Variance; 3/27) ¶ Mark O’Connell thinks out loud about John D’Agata, Mike Daisey, and even Kony 2012, all in one go. “The poetry of fact is inevitably less poetic when the facts turn out to be counterfeit.” Hear, hear. (The Millions) ¶ And, while we’re on the subject of Mike Daisy, let’s hear from Maria Bustillos — who, having worked there, actually knows something about China — with an update on “orientalism.” (The Awl; 3/29) 

¶ Rohan Maitzen proposes a return to the free and impressionistic criticism  exemplified by the two series of Common Reader pieces written by the very uncommon Virginia Woolf. (Open Letters Monthly; via 3 Quarks Daily) ¶ Also arguing that we need to re-establish a common language that explains the world to non-specialists, Carl Zimmer proposes Alan Alda’s Flame Challenge. (The Loom; 3/5) ¶ Never mind bad books; Tim Parks wonders if it’s really necessary to finish reading the good ones. (NYRBlog) ¶ Everyone wants to beat up on Jonathan Franzen, most recently for writing that Edith Wharton wasn’t pretty, and have to agree that he brings this hostility upon himself. We should have said that what made Edith Wharton unattractive was her impatient intelligence, which was a great deal less becoming in constrained Old New York (which she quitted) than any degree of plainness. In any case, we’re glad that Laura Miller sees Franzen’s point. (Salon; 3/16) ¶ Notes on Edith Wharton br Francine Prose, who is unblinking but also unjudging about Wharton’s casual, cringe-making anti-semitism. (NYRBlog; 3/22) ¶ Cory MacLauchlin is tantalized by the possibility of palpating the manuscript of John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces. No such luck, but a warm reminder of what is still a prime example of the posthumous hit. (The Millions; 3/26) ¶ Michael Hingston writes admiringly of Lysley Tenorio’s linked story collection, Monstress. (The Rumpus) ¶ Michelle Dean wishes that she’d been there when Wallace Stevens took a swing at Ernest Hemingway — and broke his hand. (The Rumpus; 3/27)

¶ Nicole Cliffe captures the great fun of having read The Secret History, which certainly would have inspired us to major in Classics, had we been younger. Also: why nobody will ever make a successful film adaptation. And don’t skip the discussion questions. By the way, Nicole, The Little Friend is pretty good, too; it’s sort of Harper Lee’s second novel. (The Awl; 3/22) ¶ Susan Orlean @ Days of Yore: “Write, write, write, and then read. Then read some more. Then sit down and write some more. (3/27) ¶ We have no idea what makes this timely, but Karen Cook’s Village Voice appreciation of Louise Fitzhugh, the creatrix of Harriet the Spy, is clearly General Delivery. (via MetaFilter; 3/29)

¶ Whit Stillman has a new film coming out next months, his first since the Nineties. To prepare for Damsels in Distress, have a look at Lindsey Bahr’s review of Metropolitan, Barcelona, and The Last Days of Disco, at least two of which are concerned with such damsels. (Splitsider; 3/1) ¶ A profile of Whit Stillman, who “extols the overlooked merits of convention and the hidden virtues of the status quo.” As who wouldn’t, with such wicked stepmother issues. (NYT; 3/19) ¶ Even we were too young to watch Sid Caesar when he was new, and our appreciation of his artistry has nothing to do with nostalgia. Speaking of Artistry, nobody has mentioned the undoubtable influence of Caesar’s Aggravation Boulevard on the new Best Picture. (Splitsider; 3/2)

¶ Julia Felsenthal’s “curious history” of faux-traditional West African prints reminds us of globalization’s dense colonial roots. (Slate; via The Morning News; 3/5) ¶ Kyo Maclear visits The Monkey’s Paw used bookshop in Toronto, and realizes something that it’s easy to overlook in this networked world: the connection between a reader and a book is unique. No two people like a book in quite the same way. And every book is dead when it isn’t being read. (The Millions; 3/12) ¶ We’re all for livening up symphony orchestra concerts, but fisticuffs in the box seats is going too far! (Sun-Times; via Arts Journal; 3/16) ¶ How gurls talk! Mary HK Choi and Natasha Vargas-Cooper dish The Hunger Games. (The Awl; 3/26) ¶ JR Paris recalls a former friend who used to eat dinner seated in a chair at his open refrigerator while driving himself crazy reacting to radio news. That’s wilder than any of the Watergate characters he’s reading about in Thomas Mallon’s novel! (Mnémoglyphes; 3/27) ¶ Felix Salmon explains Damien Hirst (3/28):

Hirst, for better or worse, has moved himself out of the art market and into the consumption-goods market: he manufactures art works, sets the prices for them, and sells them to anybody willing to buy them. Once you have bought a Hirst, you then exhibit it as a way of displaying your wealth and, um, taste. Hirsts have not been a speculative investment since 2008, and I very much doubt the Tate retrospective is going to change that.

Have a Look: ¶ Maria Popova’s selection of vintage posters from 20th Century Travel. (Brain Pickings; 3/3) ¶ The new look at kottke.org, which reminds us of what we did almost two years ago. Except of course for the vastly superior tech. Where can we buy some of that? (3/5) ¶ Intersections in the Age of Driverless Cars. (@ kottke.org; 3/19) ¶ Melissa Broder’s Lit Scene Tarot. (HTMLGiant; 3/22) ¶ Clothes link the characters in the two tales of W./E. (Clothes on Film; 3/27)

Noted: ¶ Count Lustig’s Ten Commandments for Con Men. (Lists of Note; via kottke.org; 3/1) ¶ Hey girl. Ryan Gosling meme roundup @ MetaFilter. (3/2) ¶ Tyler Cowen is “pleased to have no middle initial.” ¶ The actual Irish speak up: “We don’t really like “Danny Boy.” (IrishTimes; via Real Clear World; 3/5) ¶ Next time you cut your finger, save a life. (GOOD) ¶ What happens to clothes that you donate. (GOOD; 3/8) ¶ Armistead Maupin looks back sweetly to the days of writing on carbon paper. (Guardian; via The Browser)  ¶ Jed Perl thinks not highly of Cindy Sherman. (New Republic; 3/16) ¶ Tyler Cowen is enjoying his advance copy of Sergio de la Pava’s A Naked Singularity. (3/19) ¶ Books Re-read by Helen DeWitt. ¶ 42 Common Kitchen Fails. (via The Morning News; 3/21) ¶ Vita Sackville-West @ HiLobrow (3/26) ¶ Tumblr: the public commonplace? (The Millions) ¶ The hygiene hypothesis regarding autoimmune diseases. (80beats; 3/27) ¶ “Fighting Polluters Pits Environmental Groups Against Each Other.” (GOOD; 3/28)

Friday

From now on, at least at this site, the weekend begins on Friday. What’s become clear in the past few months is that my schedule falls into two blocs: Monday-Thursday alone and Friday-Sunday in company. I’ve got to dash off right now, in fact, to have lunch with Ray Soleil, after which we’ll drop in at the Museum. I’ll be heading downtown this evening as usual, to see what my grandson is up to. It’s in the interest of mental health that I stop regarding Friday as one the alone days.

Not that I wouldn’t love one, just to spend it reading. The Righteous Mind is incredibly exciting — I have to put it down from time to time, just to swallow its mounting import — and Elizabeth Taylor’s A View of the Harbour has just taken an unexpected turn. More anon.

***

Goodness. Just realized that I posted this entry at The Daily Blague but not here. It’s just past six, and I’m packed and ready to head downtown. I’ve had an hour or two to get my strength back after an unexpectedly strenuous tour of the Lila Acheson Wallace Galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art — that’s where the Museum keeps its “modern art.” I wanted to see the Clyfford Stills.

There’s an entire room of them, with I forgot to count how many large paintings, making Still something of a unique presence; if comparable at all, it can only be to the Msueum’s collection generous helping of Vermeers (a full seventh of that painter’s output). Of all the Abstract Expressionists, Still is my favorite because he’s such a painter. Let me qualify that: his images are the work of someone who painted with a brush in his hands. I don’t dislike Jackson Pollock; the proof of his mastery is that no one has ever been able to copy or even to adapt his visceral, iconic style. But I prefer the things that Still does, the shapes that emerge on both the large and the small scale. And I like to think what it would be like to live with one of them. I’m not sure that I’d want that.

At the moment, there’s also a nice little show, “XS,” of nice little paintings. There’s a quite beautiful Miró that I don’t recall having seen before. Outside the Galleries on the main floor is a fine collection of John Marin’s watercolors, arranged chronologically and growing ever more abstract. Because of his name, stupidly, I always think of Marin as a California artist. The subjects of the watercolors are all Northeastern, many from Maine.

I also love the Stuart Davises. But where are the Averys? Presumably they’re still on trustees’ walls. And why aren’t there a few Morandis? Doubtful: A Guy Pène du Bois revival. Also: I still don’t get Jasper Johns. He may work with paint but he is no artist in my book. A thinker, maybe. A symbolist. But not an artist.

Saturday

It’s a dark day, suitable for mulling over the darker implications, apparent only to me, perhaps, of the third part of Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind. I’m preoccupied by what he calls “the hive switch,” a transformation of egotistical individuals into a selfless unit — more precisely, a unit with only one self. I don’t doubt that his proposition is sound, but he seems to be unaware that this switch is activated in men far more often than it is in women. And of course I’m aware that it has never, to the best of my knowledge, been activated in me.

More about all of that later, when I’ve actually finished The Righteous Mind. At the moment, I’m considering Meg Wolitzer’s esaay, “The Second Shelf,” in this week’s Book Review. Wolitzer takes up the the VIDA Count, announced last month, showing that men dominate the literary scene is measured by book reviews (both as reviewers and reviewees, men take up more than two-thirds of the space). The essay poses many good questions, but offers little in the way of enlightenment, beyond the easy observation that simply to classify a work of fiction as “women’s” is problematic. What makes this strange is that men don’t read fiction, not nearly as much as women do.

I blame the academy. That’s where most men learn about literature and where their tastes are formed, for the most part by male professors. Most men go on after graduation to pursue non-literary careers, carrying with them the memory of books that they loved discovering as undergraduates but not venturing to keep up with newer trends as they develop. Most educated men who read regularly at all seem to prefer history to fiction, and military history to the arguably more important political or social studies.

The few men who do go into publishing or who become writers or literature professors appear to do a great deal of chest-thumping on behalf of the stars of their sex. Here’s a dirty little secret about “men’s fiction”: it’s event-centered. Lots of noise surrounds the publication of certain authors’ new novels — shock waves of advance buzz, in the case of a book such as Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding. One might almost say that a “hive switch” occurs whenever Michael Chabon or Jeffrey Eugenides comes out with new product: what I can only call universal hailure ensures. But what happens to these books over time?

Looking back, I see a canon of fiction that is more evenly divided between men and women. Take England in the Nineteenth Century: Austen, Dickens, Trollope and Eliot are the indisputables, and if you had to kick one of them off the island, it would be Trollope. In Twentieth-Century American fiction, Wharton seems to stand alone alongside Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Faulkner, but Powell and McCarthy stand unaccompanied by underread men who are gaining in acclaim. With the passage of time, British fiction of the same century appears to be dominated by a coterie of women, ranging from Ivy Compton-Burnett to Penelope Fitzgerald, who showed an eagerness to make use of whatever modernist tricks appealed to them, without concerning themselves at all with modernist theory. (The leading men, interestingly, seem to have been not only disproportionately homosexual but even less interested in modernism.)

What literature needs is a course for high school teachers entitled “Making Boys Laugh with Jane Austen.” Or at least to laugh when she smiles. I don’t know of a richer literary pleasure.  

***

Song for (about) my grandson:

Do-wah, do-wah, do-wah Kitty,
Tell us about the boy from New York City.

So fi-yi-yine. Da-doo.

Sunday

I’ve finished The Righteous Mind, I’m sorry to say. Sorry because, now, I have to go back to Turing’s Cathedral. I plodded through a chapter entitled “Monte Carlo” that had only the slimmest connection to the principality and its casino; mercifully, the word “stochastic” didn’t pop up until I consulted Wikipedia. I wish I wanted to know more about numbers, but they’re empty to me. I’d rather wash a stack of dishes than add a stack of figures. I find mathemathical concepts intriguing to the extent that numbers are excluded, as in geometry. I like my π just the way it is, unsolved.

The number of inconvenient truths that tumble out of The Righteous Mind — such as the attribution of the nation’s political polarization to the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — ought to generate a bit of nasty hum, but I’m grateful to have things out in the open. I’m delighted that Jonathan Haidt has explained, in terms that insult no one but do imply a strong case for the pervasiveness of arrogance amonst liberals, why conservative politicians fare better at election time. (They have much more to offer symbolically, and they promise to make fewer changes.) At the same time, I hope that the formerly liberal author doesn’t get too catnipped by his new ideas.

When I read, in Turing’s Cathedral, about the power of the first Soviet thermonuclear device, way back in 1961 (roughly equivalent to one percent of the sun’s output), I shuddered as if in the presence of the divine. Never mind the “as if.” We know almost nothing about how we got here, but we have somehow acquired the power to extinguish ourselves — and who would care? I find that the absence of a deity, of a known deity I should say, intensifies my sense of the sacredness of the mission, as it is clearly going to have to be, of human beings on earth. And when I consider the new world that is unfurling under the banner of the Cognitive Revolution, I feel — forget the “as if” — that we’ve just landed.

***

I was nowhere near sixteen going on seventeen when I saw The Sound of Music.  The one and only time, on Broadway. I’ve never seen the movie, and, at this point, I have a minor investment in keeping it that way. I wouldn’t see it the first time, so I’ll never see it. By “first time,” I mean the New York premiere, at the Rivoli Theatre, where you had reserved seats to see movies (in those days), and to which my parents were invited because my father had just joined the board of directors of Twentieth Century-Fox. (How nice: I got the hyphen right.) I ought to write to Matthew Weiner and offer up my experience, which would make a perfect Mad Men moment of adolescent insubordination.

I refused to go to this grand event, which, somewhere in my developing brain, I knew would involve kitsch of the blackest pitch. Fossil Darling has the documentary evidence: I sat down and wrote a soul-searing letter about how beastly my mother, whom I christened “Boris” that night (he still calls her that), was about my ick-factor reaction to the prospect of climbing every mountain. (You can’t blame her, but of course I did.) I was way past sixteen by this time, but that’s how long it used to take to make a movie out of a Broadway hit — and to dump Mary Martin (who was, it’s true, a real stretch as the virginal Maria) for Julie Andrews (who, remember, hadn’t been given either of her Broadway roles, Eliza Doolittle or Queen Guinevere). I take it that the clip that outro’ed this evening’s episode of Mad Men came from the film. I wouldn’t know.

WEIRD is a very handy acronym, coined by three cultural psychologists a couple of years ago, that ought to remind us of the limited applicability of our studies of the world — those of us who happen to be Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. Most people on earth don’t see the world as we do; according to Jonathan Haidt, who discusses the implications of the acronym in his important new book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, most people have a more complicated idea of right and wrong than we do. Haidt wants us to stop thinking of most people — those who aren’t WEIRD — as deluded or misguided. He wants to show us why most people think that WE are weird. The lesson is overdue.

In the flush of his enthusiasm, however, he seems to think that we really are weird. Returning to the University of Virginia from a three-month Fulbright fellowship in Orissa, in southern India, he senses the first stirrings of an “ethic of divinity,” an awareness that his rigorously secular upbringing might have been missing something. He’s right, but he is also impatient, as people always are with new discoveries. At a cafeteria, he is affronted by the vulgarity of a young woman who thanks a friend for a big favor by saying that, if the friend were a man, she would know just how to say “thank you.” I am not going to repeat the details that Haidt (quite rightly) finds disgusting.

The ethic of divinity lets us give voice to inchoate feelings of elevation and degradation — our sense of “higher” and “lower.” It gives us a way to condemn crass consumerism and mindless or trivialized sexuality. We can understand long-standing laments about the spiritual emptiness of consumer society in which everyone’s mission is to satisfy their personal desires.

As tantrums indulged by WEIRD people who have “seen the light” go, this is very representative stuff. As insight into WEIRD malaise, however, it is totally unhelpful. We can’t go back to Orissa, and most people in Orissa would take about a generation to become WEIRD if they relocated to Toledo. Crass consumerism and mindless or trivialized sexuality are the unwanted but unavoidable costs of living in a construction zone. Here in the West, the old ethics of community and divinity were dismantled (or at least deprived of status) a long time ago, on the theory that they caused more harm than good. Living with the remaining ethic of autonomy, we have learned that it is not sufficient. We see that we need to refashion ethics of community and divinity. It is my hope (and sometimes, on good days, my conviction) that the old sense of divinity will metamorphose into a new sense of stewardship: a “green” respect for the mysteries and exigencies of life on earth. This stewardship will necessarily involve a refashioning of community obligations.  

To revisit the young woman at the cafeteria table, what’s trivialized isn’t sexuality. (“I’m kidding,” you can hear her cry.) What’s trivialized is the public space in which the remark is made. Like so many people on cell phones, the young woman is oblivious of the strangers around her; because she does not know them, or because her attention is focused upon one friend, they don’t exist. She makes her raunchy comment as if they weren’t there, but of course they are there. Her rude thoughtlessness is what you have to expect when the ethic of autonomy is all that people have to go on, and Haidt is right to be disgusted. But the prevailing way of life in Orissa has nothing to tell us about how to advance. It only reminds us where we’ve been — in an everyday landscape littered by an even more extensive disregard for the public sphere. (“Cows and dogs roamed freely around town,” Haidt reminisces, “so you had to step carefully around their droppings; you sometimes saw people defecating by the roadside; and garbage was often heaped into fly-swarmed piles.”) 

What we need is an ethic of public respect. Obviously, it’s going to need a better name than that; ever since the French Revolution, we’ve seen that invocations of the “public” interest tend to bring out the worst in people and politicians. “Honorable stewardship” is the best that I can do this morning.

***

Where did the sun go? I’ll be out for a few hours, making grand rounds. (I’m going to ask the internist, as long as I’m there for my annual physical exam, to drop some Blephamide, prescribed the other day by the ophthalmologist, into my eyes. I’m hopeless at it myself and would just spill it down my cheeks. Kathleen takes care of the operation mornings and nights, but that leaves two midday doses.) I can’t wait to see how much more of the intersection of 86th Street and Second Avenue has been torn up since yesterday. It’s looking like Baghdad out there — and sounding like it, too. Blasting begins any day.

Perhaps it was the hour, but reading That Woman late last night caused me to realize that the story of Wallis Simpson and David Windsor is basically a whodunit, with the corpus delecti an empty throne. An abdication is certainly a kind of death, when you think about it — which you don’t, because abdications are sensationally uncommon and aren’t really much like one another, much less anything else. What happened between 1934 and 1936? Who else was involved in David’s ultimate decision to abandon his throne so that he could marry Wallis? What did Wallis really think about it? These questions may not be of world-historical importance, but we don’t ask them out of garden-variety prurience. The Abdication is something of an unsolved murder mystery, and that’s why, in the hands of a compelling writer, it makes a gripping yarn.

For decades — from the crisis itself until just the other day, it seems — the “crime” was attributed entirely to Wallis. Represented as a sexual predator and an adventuress, the daughter of decayed Baltimore gentry was presumed to have pinned her social ambitions to the most glamorous victim imaginable, the heir to the King of England. She tossed over her husband, Ernest Simpson (and who knew, by the way, that Simpson was a Jew?), and she made David toss over his other lady friends, Freda Dudley Ward and Thelma, Viscountess Furness. Once married to David, Wallis drove him on a relentless course of globetrotting entertainments and jewelry-buying sprees — paltry compensation for the vanished throne.

A different Wallis has been emerging of late. I have no idea why. It could be the letters that feature so prominently at the climax of Madonna’s W./E. It could be the natural pendulum of sympathy, which can be counted on to swing back and forth a few times in the aftermath of shocking events. This new Wallis is a party girl who got in over her head. Worn down by a history of precarious finances, she was immobilized by David’s lavish generosity — a new development for him, by the way, one that she seems to have been the first to inspire. Anne Sebba, who is certainly a compelling writer, sees a dilemma, not a strategy:

Still convinced that this was an infatuation that would pass, she told him that his ‘behaviour last night made me realise how very alone I shall be some day — and because I love you I don’t seem to have the strength to protect myself from your youthfulness.” If she was not deemed good enough for Felipe Espil when she was a decade younger, surely it was only a matter of time before the heir to the British throne tossed her in the same way? Frozen with anxiety, she could not move. The Prince responded by giving her more gifts of money and jewelry, further sapping her resolve to walk away. It would not be out of character to imagine that Wallis was making a mental calculation of what she would need if she were to be abandoned by both men.

This conforms to the portrait that Madonna paints. It is not the conduct of a bold schemer but rather that of a trapped pet. And it vitiates the claim that Wallis was the “murderer” of King Edward VIII. So, if she wasn’t, who was? Whodunit? I don’t expect Sebba’s book to solve the mystery, but it promises to point detectives in a different direction. More about that anon; I’m only on page 137.  

 The ophthalmologist could see me, but only this morning; he and his wife (who runs his office) are flying off to Berlin this afternoon. I was sure that I’d had my eyes checked since Will was born; I still have very clear memories of showing of photographs of him on the iPad, even though they can’t be true, since I haven’t been.

The examination was inconclusive. Tentatively: conjuctivitis and something unknown, the something unknown currently obscrued by a blog of blood. Drops will reduce that over the next two weeks, and then the doctor will have another look.

The ophthalmologist could see me, at 9:30 this morning. The only thing that gets me out of the house that early is a colonoscopy (so as to break fast soonest). I had no idea how to arrange the morning. I thought about canceling, but not serously. I got out of bed, dressed, and went across the street for breakfast. Then I came home to make tea and toast for Kathleen. At 8:45, I set out. The morning was clear and cool — cold, almost. Blustery. I cut over to Third at 84nd and then to Park at 82nd. I arrived at the 70th Street office about five minutes early. I was on my way home, via Madison, at 9:35.

It was a few minutes before ten when I pulled up at Crawford Doyle, so I wasn’t surprised to find it shuttered. I needed to buy (get him) two Elizabeth Taylor novels, A View of the Harbour and Blaming. I had begun A Game of Hide and Seek, but it seemed very sad and not particularly dry, so I set it aside at once. The other titles had been highly recommended, so I thought I’d continue my perusal of Taylor with one of them. At a few minutes past ten, the shop opened up, and somehow the need for two books developed into the purchase of six.

***

 One of those books was Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. I have more or less dropped everything in order to read this book, which, from what I could tell, and certainly from what I have read so far, accords with a great many conclusions that I’d begun reaching even before the Cognitive Revolution got going. Top of the list: the delusion of rationality, the idea that man (very much the male of the species) is a rational animal. I’ve regarded Plato as a crock for well over twenty years; before that, I labored under the apprehension that I would never be bright enough to understand him.

Haidt is no modernist; his previous book was subtitled Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom. I wouldn’t call him a West-basher, either, but he does make the case that morality in the West is somewhat cramped by global standards. (He hasn’t mentioned how much this limitation to the individual perspective owes to Christianity, which was from the start remarkably unconcerned with honor, purity, and — strictly speaking — authority. It’s this last item that preoccupies me. In the West, authority has lost all foundation, such that even if might doesn’t make right it’s the only thing that gets the job done. On optimistic days, I like to think that the idea of authority is undergoing a thorough overhaul in the Western imagination, and that in order to get on with the work we had to get rid of the older model.

On very optimistic days, I imagine that Age will once again command respect.

***

On Friday, I went to see Jeff, Who Lives at Home. It’s a very good movie, but good precisely for being utterly unremarkable. The Duplass brothers have concocted a filmmaking technique that condenses the tedium of everyday American life (Hooters, strip malls, cubicles) into a sort of visual punch that is itself full of refreshment. Ed Helms upstages Jason Segel by being not at all nice and embodying all the worldly attachments that Asian transcendentalism counsels us to avoid. He is a complete prick to his sweetly vexed wife (played by Judy Greer). Somebody really ought to make a picture in which Mr Helms plays twins, one as evil as Pat in this picture and one as sunny as Tim in Cedar Rapids.

My own private Susan Sarandon, alas, was not up to a romance with Rae Dawn Chong, kissing under the waterfall or elsewhere. That’s just me.

Saturday

This afternoon and evening, a double-bill of Paul Taylor programs; six ballets in one day. Four of which we have seen before, one of which is having its first New York season.

As a result: an irregular weekend. No housekeeping today! I might have gotten up early, &c, but we did not get up early, and when I was finished with the Times I plowed right back into Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, Elizabeth Taylor’s penultimate novel. We know the story, or the part of the story that surived adaptation, from the film of the same name, with Joan Plowright and Rupert Friend. The book, as you might imagine, is darker, less whimsical. Well, it has more to say about getting old, for one thing; and, for another, the young man in the case, Ludovic Myer, is bound to appear more attractive if you’re not privy to his thoughts.

Last night, we watched Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, which has just come out on DVD. Now that I didn’t have to try to follow the story, as I did in the theatre, finding the entire subject of Cold War espionage both tedious and regrettable, I could focus on how well-made the film is. Gary Oldman is very good.

What stuck in my mind afterward was the “aesthetic” argument for supporting the Soviets that is advanced by the traitor at the end. It was an argument launched by actual defectors in the Fifties — the West was decadent, &c; the future belonged to socialism, &c. Talking through my hat, connecting bits and pieces of possibly erroneous memory, I would say that, on the whole, the men making this argument came from Tory backgrounds, which was why the “aesthetic” frame was so much more appealing than a political one would have been. What the defectors shared with many conservative but loyal Britons was a visceral loathing for the Americans.

I thought of all the reasons for this loathing, and that kept me busy for quite a while. The only one that I want to mention now is the matter of language, which, as I get older, I see with sympathy for the English. Their language is not spoken in my country — not widely. What almost all Americans, even educated ones, who can do better on occasion, speak, for daily currency, is a dialect of Low German that I would call the International Language of High School. It must be unbearably grating to hear familiar words tumble out in foreign expressions, mispronounced and strung together without rhythm or art. I feel lucky not to be English myself for just this reason.

Sunday

This season, our fourth, we saw nine ballets (eight different ones) by Paul Taylor, and we’re not as mystified by the immense pleasure of watching his dances as we used to be. For one thing, we understand the dancing much better than we did. We have learned to expect a seamlessness in the choreography, an endless onrollong of connections and disconnections that has neither beginning nor, for the most part, end. We are familiar with Taylor’s vocabulary of classical adaptation — he seems to call for every classical move except, pointedly, dancing on point — and Broadway roughhouse. We know that, as Alistair Macaulay put it in the Times, Taylor “never just follows a score; he seems to keep resisting it.”

We also know the dancers. We recognize them immediately. This is another curious aspect of Taylor’s choreography: he calls for the kind of coordination among his dancers that we associate with the classical corps de ballet, but what he does not call for is the submersion of individual identity that goes with it. His dancers are rather heterogeneous, physically — tall, short, stocky, lithe — and their virtues as dancers differ, too. Michael Trusnovec, the senior member of the company and its polestar (Mr Trusnovec is also the company’s assistant dancing master), exhibits, paradoxically, the self-containment of enormous power, and he never appears to make so much as an extraneous blink of the eyes. But for passion and longing, I look to James Samson, who is not the virtuoso that Mr Trusnovec is but who embodies a grave drramatic agony at rest that never fails to become urgent whenever he moves. Robert Kleinendorst would be the jock of the troupe if he had only half of his brain; it takes a certain genius to foreground the athletic rigor of what’s going on onstage without sacrificing the aesthetic. Without making the dancing look effortful, he makes it look hard, and yet at the same time ecstatic: What a life, his body seems to be crying, to spend it running and jumping about the stage in front of all these lovely people! And then there is Michael Novak, the new kid on the block. He reminds me that, when we started going to Paul Taylor dances, Laura Halzack was the new kid on the block, and look what’s become of her!

***

We are still a bit under the weather overall. My eye hasn’t entirely cleared up, so that risking re-infecting Will (if indeed he’s the source) would be a possibility were we to spend time together. As for Kathleen, she had a very big week career-wise, joining an important advisory council to fill a seat that was created for her; a day of training was followed by a dinner and then, on the morrow, a board meeting: two days on a very steep learning curve (although the oddest part of it all, Kathleen says, was being to consider issues without respect to an actual client’s needs). I won’t bore you with the job description; if you’ve any real interest in the field, you’ll have other ways of finding out about it. The upshot is that we’re home today, all day. It’s not a nice day for going on; I’ve actually got the heat on in the bedroom. I will probably take care of the housekeeping that yesterday’s treats precluded.

Just before breakfast, I finished reading Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont, and immediately picked up A Game of Hide and Seek, also by Elizabeth Taylor. I expect that it’s going to be the saddest of the four novels that I’ll have read when I’m finished. I rather wish that I had picked up A View of the Harbor or Taylor’s last novel, Blaming, instead, but I’ll get to them soon enough. So far, I haven’t any sense of anything acute that distinguishes Taylor from other novelists; she’s hardly alone in writing clean, modest, mildly ironic prose, but I do sense, perhaps because I’ve grown up a bit myself, the presence of the animal behind the English manner of her characters. I wrote “beneath” at first, but that’s exactly wrong; this is not a matter of deeper, “lower” natures. What I mean is that Taylor creates human beings who know, unlike all other creatures, that they are going to die.

Last night, after dinner, I thought I’d go through some catalogues that had arrived in the day’s mail. At long last, I would put into practice some painfully-acquired wisdom about the transitory nature of worldly things, especially sharp shirts and sweaters that appear in catalogues. They go on appearing in the catalogues (jammed in a basket with other catalogues) long after they disappear from the merchants’ warehouses. I must have confused catalogues with reference works. Well, no more.

Having ordered two shirts and a sweater from Westport Big and Tall, I moved through the rest of the pile, and tore out pages showing things that, if I was still interested in a day or so, I’d order even though I would no longer have those vital Customer and Source codes that appear in blue and yellow boxes on the back of every catalogue. By the end of the evening, I was able to throw most of the catalogues away.

There were two or three catalogues that I leafed through with a strange dispassion, an odd new feeling that there couldn’t possibly be anything in their pages that I might actually need. No, it was stronger than that; it was a prickle of self-criticism that would have been uncomfortable but for the after-dinner atmosphere. Page after page offered handsome photographs of items that I already owned. For the most part, I actually did use these things (pots and pans especially — I have lots of pots and pans, but I use them all, I really do). But there were dubious gadgets, and even more dubious baking pans. Someone, I forget who, was touting a baking pan in which you could cook for individual-sized pot pies, complete with lids to help brown the top crusts. This reminded me of the individual deep-dish pizza pans that I bought at Williams-Sonoma (in the store) last summer. I made deep-dish pizzas a couple of times, and I find that the pans, stacked on my kitchen cart, come in handy for a thousand uses. But I don’t know when I’m going to attempt pizza again, and, when I do, I’m all to likely to buy some new kind of special pan. Kathleen would like me to have another go at baking sourdough loaves, so I’ll probably buy some starter from King Arthur. I’ll have to be careful to avoid topping off my order with one of the many miracle concoctions that, strangely for a firm that claims to be dealing in wholesome, natural ingredieents, litter King Arthur’s pages.

In the Williams-Sonoma catalogue, I came across an astouding recipe, for rigatoni with sausage ragù — a favorite dish of mine. Always on the lookout for tweaks, I glanced at the recipe and was surprised to see that its short list of ingredients began with two kinds of flour. It turned out to be a recipe for making your own rigatoni and dumping on a jar of the store’s sausage ragù. Could anyone be so boneheaded as to follow it? There has never been a bottled sauce that’s really superior to what anyone actually capable of making pasta from scratch could throw together with a little thought; if nothing else, bottled sauces are always too sweet. If you must go to all that trouble, then at least enjoy the pasta with butter and parmesan; don’t wreck it with packaged goop.

There was no Levenger catalogue, so I wasn’t invited to giggle at the reader’s porn. I’ve written about that before. I don’t know how susceptible I still am to Levenger’s blandishments. For one thing, I’ve never been done more writing and note-taking in my life, and I’m unaware of unfulfilled needs for special materials. For another thing, I’m unaware of a cubic centimeter of available storage space. It’s also possible that I’m just getting old, and have lost the hope of ever producing the great literature that Levenger presents as a pricily affordable inevitability.

***

Kathleen and I had a good laugh about the rigatoni recipe; then we took up a discussion of something that we really don’t know anything about, which is the industrial production of pasta in Italy. It seemed to me that, while Northern Europeans inaugurated the Industrial Revolution by stamping out Adam Smiths screws and nails, the Italians, when they finally got round to fiddling with steam engines, began with the extrusion of pasta. Makes sense to me.

Suffering an attack of the vapors yesterday, I spent several hours watching movies, and my mind is just about blank as a result. Perhaps it’s not the movies but the weather. Perhaps it’s the little eye infection that has been bothering me for a couple of days. But let’s say that it was the movies that flooded my mind with so many images that there’s nowhere to move.

First, I watched Crime d’amour, an Alain Corneau film that didn’t do so well in US theatres last fall. Starring Kristin Scott Thomas and Ludivine Sagnier, it turned out to be a very clever study of revenge; I was so satisfied when it was over that I wanted to watch it again right away. But instead, I pulled out a classic that obviously inspired Crime d’amour, at least in part: Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Les diaboliques. Made in 1955, Diabolique (as it is known in English) is depressing to look at because it shows France at its poorest; the clothes may be up-to-date (sort of — only on Simone Signoret), but the living conditions are uncomfortably pre-modern. So I don’t watch the movie often and actually have difficulty remembering exactly how it comes out in the end. “Merci pour eux.“

For a complete change of pace, I turned to a movie that I’ve always known about, long possessed, but never seen, Howard Hawks’s Only Angels Have Wings, with Cary Grant and Jean Arthur. And Thomas Mitchell and Richard Barthelmess and Sig Ruman and even Rita Hayworth; the stars are only principals here — there’s almost the feeling of a Preston Sturges ensemble. I watched it because Jim Emerson recently called it “the most entertaining movie ever made.” Well, gee, that’s a recommendation! Now that I’ve seen it, I can’t say that I agree; this is a Columbia picture from 1940, and the special effects are a little on the crude side. There is one long shot of a tricky landing on a mountain top that’s probably the most exciting bit of aviation that I’ve ever seen, and I certainly liked the movie overall; but “most entertaining”? No, that palm has to go to another entry on Emerson’s desert-island list: North By Northwest.

***

Cary Grant is not famous for the movies that he made in the 1940s. Oh, The Philadelphia Story and Notorious are well-known, but they’re not Cary Grant movies, not in the way that North By Northwest is. “Even I’d like to be Cary Grant,” the actor famously and significantly quipped; but in the Forties he went in for not being Cary Grant, and Only Angels Have Wings shows him hard at work trying to be someone else — Clark Gable, possibly.

Grant looks ridiculous in his braod-brimmed hat, loose trousers, and gunbelt; when he dons his leather flight jacket, you cringe at the thought that he might suddenly turn out to be Harrison Ford. There’s a sour cast to his Geoff Carter that, on Grant, seems mean and a little nasty, and not at all interesting. We may all wish that we were Cary Grant, but we don’t want to know what wounded Cary Grant. It’s arguable, on the evidence of this film as well as that of his career, that nothing wounded Cary Grant — nothing gave him cause to pull bitter faces.

The movie’s theory of what wounded Geoff Carter is Rita Hayworth’s character, and, oh, boy, is this ever miscasting. You can imagine Cary Grant throwing a hissy fit for being made to act in a movie with Rita Hayworth, but you cannot imagine any character that he would plausibly play being interested in the likes of such a tramp. Or is she a vamp? It doesn’t matter: Cary Grant doesn’t go in for ladies of such floodlit allure, especially if, like Hayworth, they have absolutely no sense of humor. Hayworth is not a very good actress, but she is already a star here, handily blotting out, for the duration of her scenes, the presence of Jean Arthur in the rest of the movie.

***

Ever since seeing her for the first time, in François Ozon’s Huit Femmes, I have been unable to decide whether Ludivine Sagnier is pretty. Sometimes she looks angelically blonde; at others (especially in profile) her features take on a heavy, plain weight. Her eyes, without make-up, assume a startled innocence that makes her seem not only fragile but too young to be in the movies. But she can do big girls, too, as Ozon’s Swimming Pool makes clear. In Crime d’amour, Ms Sagnier is just as complicated and impossible to pin down as her co-star, who has been defying categorization for the length of her career.

I think that it had something to do with the haircut: Kristin Scott Thomas kept reminding me of Stéphane Audran, who could easily have played Christine, the dangerous boss with a feline interest in playing with her employees. Later, I would think of how well Ms Scott Thomas would have done in Ms Audran’s roles — as Babette, certainly; as Alice (in Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie); as Huguette (Coup de torchon). In the end, though, I prefer the movies in which Kristin Scott Thomas’s character has a lot of wicked fun, as she does in Salmon Fishing in the Yemen.

Yes, that’s what I want: remakes of The Palm Beach Story and The Great Lie in which Kristin Scott Thomas takes the Mary Astor parts. “Nitz, Toto, nitz!“

In the middle of the last decade and beyond, I went to a fair number of book events, readings and signings. I stopped going for a number of reasons, but one of them was a feeling of importunity: I wanted something from the book event experience that it was unreasonable to expect authors to provide. I didn’t want to present myself as a fan. No; I wanted to present myself as a serious reader, with not entirely inarticulate thoughts of his own. I wanted, in short, to present myself as an author myself, as the author of this site.

That’s why I went down to the Village yesterday evening to see and hear and to meet Peter Cameron, who read from his new novel, Coral Glynn, answered a few questions, and then signed books. (Someone asked him where the book’s title came from, and that turned out to be quite a story.) A few weeks ago, I scribbled some notions about Coral Glynn in this space, and, the next morning, I received a nice note from Mr Cameron. It was not my best moment by any means; my remarks had been glancing and less than coherent. I was convinced that Coral Glynn was laced with allusions and other references to mid-century British fiction, and afraid that, if I attempted a straightforward commentary, I’d reveal a stunning ignorance of this literature — all the more stunning in being illusory, as I am not in fact ignorant of it.

I felt challenged by Coral Glynn  to guess its secrets and to crack its codes. The mainstream reviews, to my mind, were all wet; they took the book at face value, a period story about the silent sufferings of extremely repressed English men and women. Stiff upper lip and all that. In the end, they all made Coral Glynn into the book version of one of those porcelain or textile tchotchkes that can be ordered from the pages of the BBC catalogue and elsewhere. I’ll be the first to acknowledge that the surface of Coral Glynn might be described as “unassuming.” But I’ll be the last to let it go at that.

Since I couldn’t think of anything clever to say, I hemmed and hawed and gagged. Nevertheless, Peter Cameron dropped me a nice note to thank me. So I was able to present myself in the desired capacity last night at Three Lives Books. Mr Cameron may have regarded me as a deluded pilgrim from Yorkville, but he could not have been more pleasant, and I had none of the old feeling of shortcoming when, afterward, I headed uptown for dinner with Kathleen.

Mr Cameron replied to one question with the statement that he writes “from his subconscious.” My first reaction to this was to feel foolish about looking for hidden meanings in Coral Glynn, because any meanings remaining hidden would be locked up in the author’s mind. Then I thought: “How American.” I could hear an Englishman saying the same thing, and Coral Glynn was there to remind me why. The English don’t have subconsciouses; it’s not allowed. They are forced by each other to register but repress so much information about status and permission that there is neither the room nor the energy for subterranean drives. If you do have a subconscious, poor sod, then you have no choice but follow Edward St Aubyn into substance abuse, to shut it up. For the Coral Glynns of the world, just getting through the day without provoking hostilities is exhausting enough.

Three Lives is easily the most charming book shop that I’ve ever visited, ancient-seeming but not at all musty. I had never been before. I wonder if I’m carrying this native New Yorker thing too far. No self-respecting native New Yorker toddles out to gawp at the Statue of Liberty up close. You’d think I believed that walking around Greenwich Village is for out-of-towners. I never seem to have any reason to go to that part of town. And the part of town that I live in is one that almost no one from anywhere else knows or wants to know anything about.

***

 

My plan is to go downtown this evening, to Three Lives Books, for Peter Cameron’s reading. I found out about it yesterday (someone told me), and, for once, my to-do list is clear enough for me to contemplate the excursion. I’ll take along my copies of two of Mr Cameron’s books, the new Coral Glynn and the classic Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You, which I’m about to finish for the second time.

Last night, as I was breezing through the second half of the book, I kept coming up with questions for the author. I didn’t write them down, and now I can’t remember any of them, because, after all, they amounted to little more than anticipatory literary chitchat. Decades from now, someone will produce a reaonsably scholarly biography of Peter Cameron, and unearth connections between his fiction and his life, such as they may be. The trade-off for being alive at the same time as an interesting author is that you never get to find out any of that interesting information. The question is, though: why is it interesting?

Mr Cameron’s second novel, Andorra, is full of interesting narrative decisions, but the book itself did not interest me. I was tremendously put off, on a sexual-preference level, by his application of the name of a mountain-bound feudal remnant to a seaside locality. It must the result, this aversion, of my passionate childhood philately, which was fueled by my innate desire to know where everything is. Where is always more directly interesting to me that why or how. So all that I really remember about Andorra is that it tapered into metafiction, whatever that means (and I may be wrong), and that Andorra wasn’t where it was supposed to be. And although I bought This Is the City of Your Final Destination, I did not read it. If Ms NOLA hadn’t strongly recommended Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You, I’m not sure that I’d be following the author. As it is, I already want to re-read Coral Glynn.

***

James Sveck, the protagonist of Someday, is enviably bright and sophisticated. That is, I envy him as if I were still his age, eighteen. He’s so way ahead of me! And already he has mastered that fully expressive deadpan that makes me just about squeal with delight.

I sometimes got spooked working alone in the gallery. Anyone could walk in off the street and often anyone did, and the problem was you had to be cordial and welcoming even if you instantly knew they were freaks. John told me that if anyone really seemed dangerous I should tell him or her that the gallery was closing early and escort them out and lock the door. If they refused to leave I was to call the building’s security guard, but since he spent most of his time out on the sidewalk smoking and saying things like “Baby, baby, you don’t look so happy, I can make you very happy, baby” to the women walking by, and since the elevator (if it was working) took about half an hour to reach the sixth floor, I knew I would be dead before any help arrived.

The entire paragraph vibrates on a tension between “often anyone did” and “I knew I would be dead.” The exaggeration is funny, but it does not disarm the menace, at least for someone who, like James, thinks that he expects the worst.

And then there are the sessions with Dr Adler, the psychiatrist. I suppose I’d like to know how Peter Cameron conceived these scenes. Did he go to a shrink in his teens? How else would he know? Maybe he has a friend in the profession who has briefed him well. I’m curious. Because even though more than fifty years have passed since I spent my hours in the office of a Dr Knight in Scarsdale, James’s encounters with Dr Adler are palpably identical. The older person reacts to what the young person says, with neutral-seeming probes. To the young person, who is an adolescent, very much in between states and very tired of being in transit, the doctor’s attempt to fix meanings and references is uncommonly annoying. I sit there; I don’t know who I am, only who I don’t want to be, which is pretty much who I seem to be but know that I can’t really be, because, if it is, if I am, then I’m going to commit suicide.

James dreams of buying a solid, stone-clad old house in a quiet Midwestern suburb, and getting a job as a librarian. This is meant to be funny, by which I mean that the author introduces the dream at the most incongruous points in the narrative. What a strange little old man James is, dreaming of retirement already. But it’s the prime of life that terrifies him: how on earth will he be a man? I couldn’t imagine it, either. I took refuge in history books, in daydreams of living in the Fifteenth or the Eighteenth Centuries.

On the cross-country trip that my family took in the summer of 1962, we stopped at my father’s birthplace, Clinton, Iowa, where he still had relatives. Among these was an elderly cousin and his wife who had never had children but who were still, or perhaps for that very reason, very sporty and youthful. They lived in a very pleasant one-story cottage-like house with a wrap-around verandah. It was as though they had flown an acre of New England to the heights above the Mississippi. The next stop on our trip was Chicago, but by the time our departure came round I’d made fast friends with the cousin’s wife, also a reader of The New Yorker, and she asked my parents if I could stay on for a week or so and then join up with them later. I don’t know why my mother declined this invitation, but she and my father may have been concerned that I would exhibit some shocking, shaming eccentricity in their absence and that they wouldn’t be there for quick damage control. It wasn’t that I had actually done anything really shocking or shaming (perhaps I’m forgetting something), but I was already regarded as an odd child, difficult to manage and possibly bad-tempered. My parents were probably only doing the responsible thing. But the vision of the week that I’d have spent with the happy older couple in their vine-clad house established itself as a vision of paradise that has diminished only to the extent that I find myself actually inhabiting it (albeit in a New York apartment), now that I am their age, and no longer have to worry about being a man.

A piece of music that I have known well for most of my life (as who hasn’t, I’m inclined to ask), Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll, was transformed for me on Saturday afternoon by Paul Taylor’s choreography for Roses, a ballet that we hadn’t seen before. This is Taylor at his most pastoral and elegaic. I’m embarrassed to say that I see the dancers, in retrospect, at rest, not in motion, but I also remember that there was nothing at all static about it. I was peaceably engulfed, at one moment, by the notion that Roses embodies everything that is precious to me about life, and that therefore it would make a fitting memorial, if one were wanted. Talk about pastoral! Now that I think of it, though, Roses does convey something of the tender loss that abides in all the great Poussin canvases.

The other dances on the program were Gossamer Gallants, and Promethean Fire. Gossamer Gallants, a crowd-pleaser but pleasant withal, is the sort of thing that makes serious dance fans frown down their lorgnettes at Paul Taylor. I didn’t much care for the insect headdresses that the boys wore (it made them look like early airplane pilots or, alternatively, peasants in Breughel), nor for the wings worn by everyone, but I enjoyed the swarming animal enthusiasm of the piece. What we have here, to the tune of chestnuts from The Bartered Bride, is the birds and bees minus the birds. The girls shimmy their hips, play with their springy antennae, and form a lovely desultory kick line at the end. The boys begin hungry and eager, but end up cowed and defeated. You’re reminded of the insect species of which the males do not survive the reproductive process. Perpend. Promethean Fire is a grand ballet, despite its grandiose name, which hitherto had induced me to buy tickets for programs on which it didn’t appear. It’s so good, in fact, that I swallowed my severe distaste for Leopold Stokowski’s ponderous Bachestrations, to which Taylor responds with an expert essay in structure and decomposition. There’s an extremely intriguing moment, repeated twice I think, in which the dancers each appear to be emerging from a stationary mob, but of course no one is stationary.

The Paul Taylor Dance Company is an ensemble of individuals; there is no distinction between principals and corps. It doesn’t take long to recognize the dancers, and by the third season they’re as familiar as friends. This makes writing about them difficult. You can say all the obvious things about Michael Trusnovec or Laura Halzack or Kathleen’s new favorite, Parisa Khobdeh, but quite aside from the fact that such remarks aren’t going to mean a thing to readers who haven’t seen these virtuosos dance, they don’t capture what you want to say, which is really rather foolish and personal. There is a rigor about Paul Taylor that reminds us that the dancers, whatever their private lives, exist for us on stage only; ideally, no one would know anything about them when they weren’t in costume. Anyone who has looked into Taylor’s autobiography, Private Domain, will know what I’m talking about. On the whole, his dances are so compelling that the mind does not too often wander into irrelevancies.

***

I’m very unhappy about the Dharun Ravi conviction, and I hope that it will be overturned on appeal. It’s what lawyers call a bad case, which was already evident in Ravi’s counsel’s rejection of the plea bargain. Extremely conservative when it comes to the making of laws — there can’t be too few, in my book — I have no time for the singling out of “hate” crimes, which, as here, seem to distort a proper view of causation. Call the defendant what you like, it was established to my satisfaction, by Ian Parker’s account in The New Yorker, that the role of his silly prank in Tyler Clementi’s decision to commit suicide was immaterial at best. Dharun Ravi has been punished for treating his late roommate with political incorrectness, and no one else has been punished. This seems very wrong. Rutgers University and Tyler Clementi’s parents are, to my mind, far more culpable — they were the adults in Tyler’s life, but they were useless to him. Dharun Ravi, for his part, was expected to figure out his responsibilities on his own. He may be a jerk, but I feel deeply sorry for him.

It has been a long time since I last saw the St Patrick’s Day experience up close, and I hope that it will be a very long time before I see it again. Given the mild winter that we’ve had, and the pleasant weather this weekend, it’s easy to see the sprawl of funseekers attired in unattractive green outfits as a rite of spring, an utterly charmless version of Mardi Gras staged in Manhattan by young people from elsewhere. Let this entry be a plea to Gotham’s hipsters: please, we beg of you, impose some discipline on this yesty letting-go.

***

At some point in early middle age, I gave up expecting film adaptations to capture whatever it was about books that I’d really liked, and life got a lot easier. I might still hate a movie, but I didn’t take its botched representations as an insult to the novel that allegedly inspired it. Novels and films have nothing in common; they travel on parallel trajectories that will never intersect. A book that yields readily to cinematic adaptation is less likely to be a novel than a scenario. The true virtue of fiction — the writing — cannot be translated into imagery at all. Once you accept this rule, there is more pleasure to be had.

François Ozon’s Angel is an example of how going wrong can work out right. I gather that this deeply unfaithful adaption of Elizabeth Taylor’s 1957 novel was not received, in Britain, anyway, with unalloyed rapture, and to the best of my knowledge an American release was never undertaken. One IMDb commenter remarked, “It’s hard to know what attracted Ozon to Elizabeth Taylor’s fantastic source novel as his adaptation is misjudged on a number of levels. … He doesn’t seem able to master Taylor’s irony at all.” Certainly there is nothing ironic about Ozon’s presentation of his heroine. I’m not quite sure how literary irony works in the movies, but I’m pretty sure that I wouldn’t be able to sit through a feature-length attempt to capture the peculiarities of Taylor‘s heroine.

Angel Deverell is the writer of popular novels that, by any literary measure, are simply awful. Angel, although possessed of a large vocabulary, is not a reader. She writes not in communion with writers who have gone before her but in straightforward regurgitation of her own longings, which, for a time, harmonize with those of the market for escapist fantasy. Nor does Angel write because she is obliged to by the mysterious inner necessity to which almost every literary novelist attributes the stamina required to create a novel. Angel’s objective is to get rich, to escape her humble origins. She peddles her fancies in order to afford to bring her own actual life into line with them. She buys the great house in which her aunt was a lady’s maid, not because she likes the place or dreamed of living in it (she seems not to have known where it was, much less what it looked like), but in order to close a psychological circuit by becoming, as chatelaine of Paradise House, the grand dame who once condescended to invite her to visit as a member of the servant class. When, for the first time, she runs into a man whose attractions she can’t put out of her mind, she buys him as well. She goes on buying things long after her popularity recedes, and at the end she dies in shabby gentility, under equally irresponsible circumstances: Angel has always refused to see a doctor. Doctors and accountants have no place in the dream-world that she seeks to make real.

Watching a movie about such foolishness would be extremely confusing. One the one hand, Angel is a narcissist — the opposite of sympathetic. Taylor says so, almost in passing. At the same time, however, Angel is only a narcissist; she is not a monster. There is something almost winning about her lack of intelligent calculation, her protracted immaturity. And she regards herself as a success right up to the end. She has set out to achieve fame, fortune, and love, and the achievement itself is proof against reversal.

Ozon’s Angel does not die anywhere near so happily. In a drastic contraction of a long and rather funny scene in the novel, the movie Angel discovers that her husband was in love with another woman, and not just any other woman, but the very daughter of Paradise House after whom she herself was named. Carelessly stepping out into the snow in search of a favorite kitten — one thinks of those dranged bel canto heroines in their mad scenes — Angel contracts pneumonia and dies, just like that. The End! Compared to the richness of Taylor’s exordium, Ozon’s is simply terrible.

Or it would be if Ozon didn’t know exactly what he is up to, and we weren’t clever enough to see it. He has given us The Real Life of Angel Deverell as Angel Deverell would have written it. He has taken Taylor’s novel and subjected it to a complete overhaul at the hands of its principal character. Enough of the novel is preserved to show that Angel is seen by many people to be ridiculous, but it is not an impression shared by the movie. In the movie, Angel is bigger than life, someone who lives the dream. And she does so in the most extraordinary costumes!

Taylor’s Angel is not plain or ill-favored, but there is something pinched about her physiognomy that spoils any claim to beauty. As if aware of this, Angel devotes a great deal of time to mooning over the smooth white skins of her hands, which she is forever arranging artfully. There is none of this in the movie. Why should there be? Angel is played by a real beauty, Romola Garai. Ms Garai is, I must say, extraordinary; she completely captures Angel’s conviction that, having paid the bills, she can’t be expected to do anything further. Angel never tries to be charming, and the actress doesn’t, either. Instead, she enables the director to substitute for the verbal irony of Taylor’s text the psychological irony that’s betrayed by the conviction shared by so many people of subpar intelligence, that they are unusually gifted.

Heaven only knows what viewers who haven’t read the novel make of Angel. The film is complicated somewhat by the filmmaker’s interest in a certain kind of excess, a visual celebration of colorful bad taste that runs like a thread through his work, from Sitcom and Huit Femmes right up to Potiche. What if Douglas Sirk had been a party animal? Something very like François Ozon would be the result. Without the anchor of Taylor’s novel, and what we know about the imagination of Taylor’s Angel, the movie might seem to be accidentally cartoonish and underdeveloped. In fact, there is no accident.

Something odd and new and very agreeable happened yesterday. As I was cleaning up after dinner, thinking about Friends With Kids in the feeling way that movies that get to you leave you with, I understood that the life that I’m leading is every bit as chic, amusing and romantic as the lives of the characters in that romantic comedy set in New York City. And probably a bit more sophisticated. The movie stars’ glamour had bowled me over, as it always does. (What would Jon Hamm look life if he were sitting here thinking my thoughts and trying to decide whether to continue the struggle with prose or to go boil a couple of eggs? Would Jennifer Westfeldt even talk to me?) But I felt no envy. I did not want to trade in my familiar apartment for their art-directed abodes. I would be happy to stay put. And I’ve no doubt in the world that I owe this enlightened tranquillity to the same thing that unites the screwball couple in Friends With Kids: a little boy. In my case, a grandson.

When people, such as Jennifer Westfeldt — the writer and director of Friends With Kids — says that she doesn’t feel the “urge” to have children, I want to bang her on the head and ask her how she thinks she’s going to have grandchildren otherwise? This is a transformation of the complaint that young people get from their parents about “giving us grandchildren.” Forget about giving your parents grandchildren. You should be thinking about giving yourself grandchildren.

*** 

The movie’s title, as well as its ad campaign, suggest an ensemble piece in the tradition of The Big Chill. But Friends With Kids is something else altogether: a screwball comedy with children. Other recent examples of the genre are The Switch and Life As We Know It. The basic screwball formula calls for a couple of romantic leads who, for one reason or another, don’t see themselves as a couple. They’re eventually roused from this delusion (but not at the same time) by the squirmy jealousy that each of them feels when confronted by the sight of the other in the amorous arms of a third party. The new wrinkle is a magical effect attributed to children: children, by making their minders realize What’s Important In Life, open their eyes to the virtue and attractiveness of their partners in child-rearing. The magic is paradoxical, because children also wear you down so badly that you live like a subsistence farmer. In this regard, they play the role of Hitting Bottom in addiction narratives.

Friends With Kids varies the formula by eliding the wearing-down part. The lead couple’s friends have children who wear them down, but little Joe, the darling baby boy(played by uncredited actors) parented by best friends Julie (Ms Westfeldt) and Jason (Adam Scott), is an angel who never causes the slightest inconvenience. Julie and Jason go right on with their well-appointed, tidy lives; stray toys do not litter their living rooms. This fantasy is palpable during the film, but it doesn’t get in the way, because the movie has an altogether different point to make. Friends With Kids isn’t a film about a couple of bright thirtysomethings who think that it would be great to have a kid (before it’s too late), only to find out (too late) that children can bring an apocalyptic end to life as we know it. This is a film about a couple of bright thirtysomethings who think that it would be great to have a kid without the grown-up mess of lapsed personal hygeine and moribund sex lives. Julie and Jason, observing their friends, conclude that kids can’t wreck the romance if the romance hasn’t produced the kids. So they’ll have their baby and share responsibility and continue the hunt for a soul-mate. Which turns out to be brilliant, because they would never have found one another otherwise.

Despite its glossy finish, Friends With Kids is not slick. The comedy is made to digest an enormous amount of discomfort. Two of the friends, the couple played by Kristen Wiig and Jon Hamm, begin to fall apart almost immediately, and not attractively; Ms Wiig takes on an embalmed expression in her first scene as a new parent. Two other friends, the couple played by Maya Rudolph and Chris O’Dowd, are reduced to a semi-slovenliness that does not go unnoticed by either. Julie and Jason, for all their kempt self-possession, worry greatly about finding love, and they do so on a quiet back-channel that has nothing to do with the much-discussed problem of finding a lover. The sweetness of the film’s production values (the appealing actors, the chic settings) coats a good deal of quiet bitterness. When everyone gathers at a Vermont ski resort for a weekend of fun (and for the pleasure of getting to know Julie’s and Jason’s significant others, played by Ed Burns and Megan Fox), the good times are irreparably soured when Mr Hamm’s character takes his marital frustrations out on his friends. The realism of this scene, with its madly self-destructive surge, is almost unwatchable.

There’s only one inexplicable moment in Friends With Kids. Julie’s mother (Lee Bryant) comes to babysit. Holding Joe in her arms, she tells her daughter that she ought to be asked to do this more often. Julie says, hesitantly, “I didn’t know you felt that way.” What planet? What planet?

On the day after a Remicade infusion, I am usually very quiet. I wouldn’t call it “tired.” Being tired is unpleasant, and I feel fine. But I also feel disembodied and inert. So it makes sense to go to the movies this afternoon — Friends With Kids is showing right around the corner — and try to be more productive tomorrow.

***

I’m reading Turing’s Cathedral, George Dyson’s history of the digital universe, and wondering how much I’m going to get out of it, given my inability to grasp the basics of electronics. I have read no end of descriptions of vacuum tubes and capacitors and relays, but the question always remains, what do these things do? There’s a slippage, and suddenly I’m on the other side of a gulf from whomever it is who’s trying to explain these things to me. My ignorance has a deep tap root.

I had never really thought of the hydrogen bomb as complicated, although of course it is. I simply thought that it was big. The challenge, I gather, was to assemble the parts of the bomb in a way that maximized the impact, within the device itself, of shock waves generated by preliminary explosions. Bombs within bombs. And the engineering behind this assembly required masses of trajectory calculations — reiterative calculations in which the outputs became the inputs. (I hope that I’ve got that right.) The calculations were beyond the capabilities of even the largest staff of human computers (people with adding machines). So the ENIAC machine was put together at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering, in Philadelphia, which was home to a lot of electronic innovation at the time. The ENIAC was a very powerful calculator, but it was not what we would call a computer. I’m not sure why.   

Two years ago, I read James Gleick’s engrossing tome, The Information, without learning very much of anything. I took away the imp of a paradox: information is that which we don’t know yet (your name, for example, is not information to you). But the meaning of Claude Shannon’s theories slipped right by me, and I never understood Maxwell’s demons, even when I held the book upside down and shook it. I’m afraid that I simply lack the basic knowledge of mechanics, if that’s the word, that would permit me to be meaningfully addressed by a writer on these subjects.

I’ve just taken a minute to glance over the beginning of the Wikipedia entry for “relays.” I read it as if with two brains. One brain saw how relays work. The other brain couldn’t figure out what relays do. Or maybe… It wouldn’t hurt to have someone to talk this over with.

I knew a few engineers, once, fellow students at the college radio station, and whenever they talked “engineering,” I stopped paying attention. I had serious cultural problems with engineering students, with their dress, their manners, their sense of humor. I had never met people like them before; I’d lived in a world where everyone was expected to behave like polite ladies and gentlemen, and engineers seemed to have an entirely different approach to the task of being decent human beings. In those days, I took electricity entirely for granted, and never imagined that I’d one day regret not having been sat down and and shown what it can do.