Daily Blague

When you see the print ad for Thomas Bezucha's The Family Stone, with its seven principals, after seeing the movie, you might want to suggest a rethink. Actors Tyrone Giordano and Brian White may not be as famous as any of the movie stars in the ad, but their contribution to the film is enormous. (So is that of Elizabeth Reaser.) I haven't read every review of this movie, but I don't recall reading in any of them that, of the five Stone children, one is both deaf and gay, and that his lover is black. The detail might strike you as decorative or trendy, but in fact the relationship occasions the story's moment of disaster, after which all the pretences set up in the earlier part of the film are shaken to pieces and the ground is cleared for a better ending than might have been imagined. This occurs at the dinner table - the only such scene in this Christmas-family-reunion movie. Thad (Mr Giordano) and Patrick (Mr White) are hoping to adopt a baby boy. Meredith Barton (Sarah Jessica Parker) - at this moment apparently destined to be Thad's sister-in-law - proceeds from wondering if the men are afraid of transmitting their sexual orientation to asserting, even more boorishly, that no parent could ever want a child to grow up homosexual.

Like Diane Keaton's Sybil (Thad's mother), you want to kill her, if only for her tactlessness. It must be conceded that Meredith has a point. Until very recently, it is unlikely that there were many parents who were happy that their children were homosexual. They might be happy that their children had found happiness with a good partner, but what loving parent could be happy about the burdens and disadvantages that society heaps upon its misfits. The Family Stone, if nothing else, stands for the proposition that homosexuals are not misfits - period - and this is where Mr Giordano and Mr White work their magic. Their characters are so obviously not misfits. Patrick is a black man in a white home, and Thad speaks with the alien accent and intonation of the deaf, but both belong to the Family Stone as much as anyone does, to the point of not being particularly special. (A fine touch in this film is the apparent artlessness with which family members sign while they talk.) Amy (Rachel McAdams), the "mean" Stone, took "years," according to Thad, to accept Patrick, but the fact is that she has accepted him; that's over and done with.

When the movie was over, I was running over, but I had nothing to say, even to myself, about what the movie was like. It took a while to return to normal, and, when I did, I saw that The Family Stone has captured the spirit of crisis and misadventure that afflicts every family when a prospective addition is introduced during the holidays. The film is funny and tart, and it is certainly recognizable as a romantic comedy from Hollywood. But the actors who play the eight Stones, the two Bartons, and the lovelorn ex all work hard and successfully to spike the proceedings with that special terror that we experience whenever our intimate lives are ruffled. The actors look no more and no less like each other than actors usually do, but the illusion of a genuine Family Stone is very convincing. I felt like the one who heard all about it later.

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The photograph above, André Kertész's New York, 1954, may be the only photograph reprinted in Geoff Dyer's The Ongoing Moment that I recognized, immediately, as a scene, and not as a photograph that I had seen before. The figure at the right, casting a long, wintry shadow, is standing on the John Finley Walk, by the East River. The massive building in the distance is New York Hospital, still standing but obscured from this vantage by many intervening taller buildings. The building beyond the nearer figure's head is 1 East End Avenue, a grand old co-op. I was puzzled by the picture, because 1 East End seemed to be standing where the highway ought to be. I was forgetting the curvature of the island at this point.

An attentive viewer of New York, 1954 who hadn't stood on this spot might have been greatly puzzled by the span stretching over the walk, parallel to the Queensborough Bridge in the distance. What is it part of? Another bridge, perhaps? An elevated subway line? And while it is easy to tell that the East River runs far below the walkway, it is not at all clear why that should be so. Kertész must have been tickled by the mildly inexplicable elements of his image. He could have cleared things up a bit by entitling the picture, Beneath the Brearley School Playground, 1954. For that's what the span is: one of four roughly equal sides of a rectangular level, reachable from the second floor of the Brearley School (girls K-12; Kathleen went to high school here), and still in use, I suppose, even though Brearley shares a nearby field house.

In 1954, the Walk was rather new. Now it's over fifty years old, and you can tell that from my photograph, taken yesterday in very different weather.

Those delicate "x"s have been obscured by some sort of bunting, and the view is further spoiled by a works site farther along the walk, where an adjacent building is having its balconies coped with metal, to prevent chips of cement from falling upon innocent heads.

It was my job yesterday to buy caviar for New Year's Eve at Agata & Valentina, where the quality is good and the prices are low - well, low enough for this neighborhood. I had already lugged a big shopping bag of stuff home from Eli's. The sensible thing would have been to walk along 79th Street from Third Avenue to First, where Agata is, but I didn't like the thought of lugging a big Eli's shopping bag through Agata & Valentina where all I would be buying would be tiny tins of caviar. I prefer to deceive each store's personnel into thinking that I'm loyal to its establishment. Don't I wish I could be, too. But there are lots of things that one store sells that the other doesn't. For example, frozen croissants and hors d'oeuvres. Like everything at Eli's, they're a bit overpriced, but they're also fantastic. Although I can't get M le Neveu to get beyond the pigs-in-blankets. Ms NOLA always takes pity on him and lets him have hers; it's a free country. With luck, or at least scheduled flights flying on schedule, the four of us will be together to ring in the New Year.

So I brought home the big bag of Eli's stuff - cheeses, crackers, San Francisco salamis, and a chicken pot pie for dinner tonight - and put everything away. Setting out again, I was still in the driveway when I remembered that I wanted to see what goes into Lobster Newburg, which I'm thinking of fixing for New Year's Eve. On my way back upstairs, I remembered, too, that I wanted to see Kertész's view for myself. I grabbed the camera for good measure.

Here is the Brearley School, sort of. It's obviously a reflection of the building in a puddle, flipped both ways. I hope it doesn't make you seasick. Perhaps Kathleen will post a comment, sharing her first-day feeling of going to a women's prison; my photograph captures something of that, I think.

You can see the playground's upper fencing at the lower left. I apologise for all the brown dog-bones of cheap repaving fixes. Like most park walks in New York, this one is "tiled" with asphalt hexagons. They wear out pretty quickly. If I were Geoff Dyer, I might call attention to the brown spot that appears to be an illuminated lamppost. Sitting down to write about The Ongoing Moment, I saw right away that I must first re-read Susan Sontag's On Photography, paying closer attention this time. One of Sontag's six chapters is devoted to the impact of Surrealism upon photography, which, I now see, was enormous. Sadly, Surrealism has always been, for me, a matter of paintings by de Chirico and Magritte, and the sliced eye in Un chien andalou. I have never taken it very seriously. I thought that it intended not to be taken seriously, but in that I was incorrect.

Click here to see the original image, full-size.

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Kathleen couldn't find her cell phone, so we decided that trying to meet on the Upper West Side without a restaurant in mind was a bad idea. It would be better if she came home after the doctor's appointment and we went to dinner from there. She walked in just as I was buckling my belt; I had finished writing just in time. We still didn't have a restaurant, but I remembered that the last time that we went to the Blue Note, we had dinner at Ennio and Michael, an Italian restaurant in LaGuardia Place, right around the corner from the jazz club. Not only did they take my reservation for a table in half an hour, but we were actually there in half an hour. Sometimes the FDR is the only way to go, even if you do have to drive all the way across Manhattan at its widest to get to Greenwich Village.

At a quarter past nine, we were in line outside the Blue Note, not far from the head. We were even closer after a woman from the club culled people who didn't have reservations. It wasn't very cold, and the rain that was already falling in New Jersey hadn't reached Manhattan (it would arrive much later, long after we were tucked in), so we had no complaints. "Oh, that's where the IFC is," I said, noting the marquee across Sixth Avenue, and wondering if you can still change at 51st Street for a train that will take you to West Fourth. 

At about ten, they let us in, and, not surprisingly, we got ringside seats. Boy, the place looked scrubbed. Kathleen attributed the clean feel to the same factor that had struck her at the Village Vanguard: no smoke. But it seemed like more than that to me. I'd have said that the entire place had been refurbished after the Mayor's smoking ban. True, it had been a while since our last visit. But I think that the Japanese who run the place (don't they?) have simply cleaned it up. There was a Japanese couple seated next to us. The gentleman was very tired, and actually rested his head on the table from time to time before the set began. But for the most part the room really did look and - more important - sound like a night club. But for the attire, the place sparkled. The Blue Note sparkling? It used to be so ... college.

We were there to hear Cassandra Wilson, who's singing at the Blue Note through New Year's Eve. Kathleen and I were slow to warm to the charms of this great blues singer; it took "The Weight," on Belly of the Sun, to win us over, but won over we were, Kathleen especially. Ms Wilson uses her bottomlessly dusky voice to deconstruct her material; she can make a standard sound completely unfamiliar, singing it as if it were jazz recitative. The effect is earthily meditative: if Ms Wilson were a Wagnerian, she'd be a great Erda. As it is, she reminds me of a completely unleashed Carmen McRae. The more I talk about Cassandra Wilson, the higher the contradictions and paradoxes are going to pile up, so I'd better move on to her great backup, which has a Latin tightness even when the rhythms are pure Delta. It is also colorful, especially since Gregoire Maret added his harmonica to the blend. Bass player Reginald Veal, percussionist (!) Jeffrey Haynes, and guitarists Brandon Ross and Marvin Sewell made a fine blues band. Here's the Muddy Waters number, "Honey Bee," that opened the set.

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Starting on Friday, I'll be reading Evelyn Waugh's Black Mischief online, at Good For You. It has been in my pile for some time, always passed over in favor of something else. A lamentable side-effect of relentless blogging is a focus on the timely, or at least upon the recent, and my contact with the classics (which Good For You was supposed to ensure) has suffered.

This is not a group read, exactly, but you're welcome to read along and to comment, either or both, as always.

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Having followed the recent rash of "Meme of Four" postings with avid interest, and finding myself in the middle of several pages with nothing quite ready for publication, I have decided to jump on for a free ride - with commentary. The number four poses interesting problems of scarcity and superfluity.

¶ Four jobs that I have had: I have not had four jobs. I was a summer clerk at the Bank of New York in the Sixties, a radio announcer and music programmer in the Seventies, and a paralegal and a lawyer in the Eighties. None of them meant nearly as much to me as the current uncompensated position whose job description I'm making up as I go along.

¶ Four movies that I could watch over and over: This is a tough one. There are dozens of movies that I do watch over and over. Every once in a while, in the kitchen, I watch a movie again right away. I'm going to give two sets, funny and not funny. Funny: Something's Gotta Give, Le Divorce, What's Up, Doc? and The Awful Truth. Not funny: Dolores Claiborne, The Gift, Runaway Jury, and The Road to Perdition.

¶ Four places I have lived: Once again, I don't quite meet the mark. I grew up in Bronxville, New York, which is a suburb sixteen miles from Times Square. Is that so different from living in Manhattan? Yes and no. Whenever I traveled as a youth, I would say that I was from New York, and my interlocutor would say, "But you don't sound like you come from Noo Yawk." In between Bronxville and Yorkville, I've lived in Notre Dame, Indiana (it has its own Zip code) and Houston, Texas.

¶ Four TV Shows that I love to watch. Not applicable.

¶ Four places that I've visited on vacation: The most recent hits, all of which I'd like to revisit, are London, Paris, Amsterdam, and Istanbul, but now that I think of it, Kathleen wasn't on vacation in three of them. I'm looking forward to Dorado Beach in a couple of months. That's in Puerto Rico. But the important thing to know, since it's not where you travel but how you travel, is that staying home is my idea of roughing it. What I really want from travel is a little bit of the ancien régime.

¶ Four Web sites that I visit daily. Now that would be a great way to get into trouble. See the list of eighteen blogs to the left. I visit all of them every weekday.

¶ Four places I'd rather be. See above.

¶ Four of my favorite foods: Fried chicken, spaghetti alla carbonara, spring rolls, and just about any cheese.

¶ Four places I would rather be. I am too old for this question; I am simply glad to be alive.

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Here's hoping that everybody's Christmas was warm and tonic, free of all the arguments that ought to be off-limits for this one day at least. For those who didn't celebrate Christmas, I'm hoping for a warm and tonic day just the same, to be enjoyed somewhere about now. Whatever else the week between Christmas and New Year's may be, it's a grand caesura in the winter doldrums. In a few weeks from the First, it will be March, and buds will be popping. The older I get, the more alarmingly quickly winter ends - as does everything else.

There were three of us here. Miss G was in Houston, with her uncle and his little twins, Ms NOLA was in New Orleans, and Kathleen's brother couldn't get away from his neck of the woods. M le Neveu arrived at about four, and we sat down about two hours later. I'd have gotten an earlier start in the kitchen, but having been so enthralled by the fun of reorganizing the linen closet on Christmas Eve, Kathleen and I could not deny ourselves the pleasure of culling our vast collection of shopping bags, which I had ripped from various closets on Friday, in a vain search for a Christmas-tree stand. When we were through, we had five bags of bags, four - S, M, L, XL - to keep in the coat closet, and another bag of souvenirs from far-flung shops, and from a few boutiques that are no longer in business. That bag we'll keep somewhere else entirely.

When the bags were behind us, I set the table, using our best porcelain, which was nice to see for a change. I dug out a linen tablecloth that required only minimal pressing. I must say that the napkins felt soft and lovely, almost like diapers but richer somehow.

Among other things, we discussed Rousseau's concept of the foreign lawgiver, as it applies to Westerns such as Shane. We are very high-end here.

After dinner, I threw the odd pots and implements into the dishwasher, clearing out the kitchen so that Kathleen could wash the dishes. When she was through, she came into the living room and sat with us. It was warm enough outdoors to crack the balcony door and get some fresh air. Christmas carols continued their shuffle play. We were almost too relaxed.

It was decided that we should watch a movie. But which one. Running through my collection, which is not small, I discerned an allergy to Christmas themes. True, I've got Christmas in Connecticut and Holiday Inn, but neither of those is a first-rate Christmas offering. As for Miracle on 34th Street and It's a Wonderful Life, I can't handle such overt manipulation. So what did we settle on but Quiz Show! This excellent 1994 film by Robert Redford is even more studded with talent than it seemed to be when it was new. I won't go so far as to call it a Christmas movie, but in its sensitive grasp of of the very different home lives of contestants Herbert Stempel and Charles van Doren, it is certainly a family movie. Quiz Show also shatters the notion that there was ever a "Golden Age" of broadcast television.

As promised, here is the recipe for our main course, Beef Stroganoff.

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If there's one thing I'm tired of, it's contents that nobody has nominated me for. So I am going to bypass the nomination and voting procedures entirely and simply award the First Annual Daily Blague Christmas Photograph Award to David Olivier, a/ka/a Slimbo, for this picture-worth-thousand-character shot of his post-Katrina, post-mold hearth.

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In which we have a look at this week's New York Times Book Review.

The Book Review is very thin, almost skimpy. Great, I thought. But I was wrong. The Book Review is skimpy because there are no advertisements. The issue contains the usual complement of reviews. I really must protest. Joe Queenan's Essay, "Wish List: No More Books!" certainly struck a nerve. And looking at the books reviewed, I had to wonder what sort of desolate, anti-seasonal state of mind the Book Review's editors wished to conjure for its readers.

Fiction

Take fiction, for example. You can have it all, this week. Consider:

¶ John Barth's collection of three novellas, Where Three Roads Meet, which, according to Deborah Friedell, works best when Mr Barth writes least self-consciously, and which becomes "almost unreadable" when he waxes "experimental." Let's just go to the dentist instead.

¶ Equally airless sounds Gabriel Brownstein's The Man From Beyond, in which Harry Houdini and Arthur Conan Doyle spend some time on the Jersey shore arguing about spiritualism. They are upstaged, reviewer Jennifer Haigh complains, by a twenty-two year-old tabloid reporter called Molly Goodman. I read Mr Brownstein's last book, a collection of literary hommages entitled The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Apt. 3W, but found that I had nothing to say about it afterward. Mr Brownstein is far from the worst writer in the world, and if he could have his Barth modules (nodules?) extracted, he might even become a good one.

¶ Rust and Bone - now, there's a Christmas title! Craig Davidson is the pseudonymous author of several horror novels, and you might think that he'd write straightforward prose, but, no; reviewer Lizzie Skurnick finds that "The writer in Davidson cannot get out of his characters' way."

In the title story, a boxer, unable to punch through ice fast enough to save his drowning nephew, destroys his right hand in a battery of increasingly violent fights. It's a fine setup, but Davidson subjects us, like his boxer's opponents, to the punishing blows of the symbolism until we're ready to scream.

¶ Finally, there's A Sudden Country, by Karen Fisher. Ms Fisher has worked as a ranch hand and as a carpenter, Sally Eckhoff tells us, and in this first novel she has taken the story of her great-great-great-great-grandmother, Lucy Mitchell as the basis for a novel. Lucy Mitchell was taken by her second husband on a trek along the Oregon trail, and needless to say the experience was greatly unlike a spin on the Interstate. Ms Fisher hews too close to the facts for Ms Eckhoff's taste, however, and the reviewer found that she couldn't work up much enthusiasm for Lucy's romantic adventures. 

There's no harm in a historic novel whose scenery is more colorful than its characters, but as Lucy starts to fade from the page, we may be a little glad to see her go.

If there is a reason for presenting any of these books in a Review bearing a Christmas Day dateline, I don't want to know what it is.

Nonfiction

¶ Just what I wanted for Christmas: to read about the presidential ambitions of Hillary Clinton as imagined by obsessive partisans! Spouses Dick Morris and Eileen McGann sex up their case against Hillary with the vision of a battle royal with Republican nominee Condoleezza Rice. Susan Estrich, on the other hand, seems wearily impatient with anyone who doubts that Hillary Clinton can not only win the next presidential election but go on to change the world. This is all such a waste of paper that I was initially titillated by Ada Calhoun's review of I'm No Saint: A Nasty Little Memoir of Loving and Leaving, by Elizabeth Hayt. But, no; "nasty" turns out to be exactly what Ms Hayt has written.

But what Sex and the City devotees want is not lusty honesty; it's Hayt's reassurance that it's cool to put up with abusive men if they'll bestow expensive gifts and that it's a sign of glamour, not snobbery, if you don't "do" public transportation.

A pox &c.

¶ Nor is there much seasonal jollity to be found in Thomas Powers' sober but sane review of The Next Attack: The Failure of the War on Terror and a Strategy for Getting It Right, by Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon. As someone who believes quite fervently that real progress will not begin in Iraq until the last American troops withdraw, I'm sorry that I don't have more common ground with Mr Powers, who points out the authors are not actually so much concerned about "the next attack" as they are in assessing how much further damage to our reputation in the Islamic world has been wrought by our Iraqi misadventure. Mr Powers also makes it clear that anyone who buys The Next Attack for the solace that a strategy for "getting it right" might afford is wasting money:

The magnitude of the problem is suggested by the fact that at this point two writers with as much experience as Benjamin and Simon don't really what to do next.

¶ Not only is John Updike's Still Looking: Essays on American Art is very much on my list, but I've just finished reviewer Geoff Dyer's The Ongoing Moment. This is not the place to talk of either. But it was serendipitous to encounter Elizabeth Royte's qualified boost for Timothy Egan's The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl so soon after looking at all the Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans photographs that Mr Dyer writes about. Mr Dyer, an Englishman, never explicitly mentions the huge role that the Dust Bowl disaster had in shaping the American photographic tradition and, as a result, giving it a thrust that constantly criticizes the naiveté of American dreams. The Worst Hard Time is a tale of American denial that suggests that the strain of courage that brought Europeans to the New World can have its foolhardy side when it comes to ignoring Mother nature.

¶ About Harvey Pekar: why can I not stop wondering why he's famous when he doesn't illustrate his own strips? Ideally, the graphic novelist writes and draws, but where the labor is divided, I put the illustrator ahead of the writer. I don't see why Dean Haspiel, then, gets one line of praise in Dave Itzkoff's review of The Quitter, while the rest is devoted to a discussion of Cleveland's most famous misfit.

¶ The six books reviewed in Jacob Heilbrunn's Nonfiction Chronicle have as little in common as they have to do with Christmas. The miscellany is so various that I'm tempted to overlook it altogether, an inclination that I overcome only by imagining what Joe Queenan would say about receiving any of them.

Tab Hunter Confidential: The Making of a Move Star, by Guess Who, with Eddie Muller. This is probably a must-read for Hollywood-studio history, of which I'm one. I have admired Mr Hunter ever since he revealed his capacity to play a bastard in Polyester.

The Solitude of Self: Thinking About Elizabeth Cady Stanton, by Vivian Gornick. A good book about Stanton, a bad book about loneliness.

Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy, by Moisés Naim. "Hijacking" can't be the right word for "ripping-off." Worse, readers will encounter "a mass of supporting detail that at times will excite only the most wonkish nerds." The better book would have compared and contrasted international businesses and the infranational thieves who steal from them as significant threats to sovereign autonomy and lawfulness.

A World of Light, by Floyd Skloot. "These essays, while laudably free of false sentimentality, inadvertently commit the opposite sin of becoming almost wholly antiseptic." Never having heard of Mr Skloot, I feel that an effective argument on his behalf would have required more than a roundup review. I do understand, that a lukewarm review is better than none, and I hope that Mr Skloot can manage to be grateful for that.

Elephant's Edge: The Republicans as a Ruling Party, by Andrew J Taylor. "This book is the latest entry in a growing field..." Next.

Legends of Modernity: Essays and Letters from Occupied Poland, 1942-1943, by Czeslaw Milosz; translated by Madeline G Levine. Milosz was a great poet and a witness to freedom's superiority to power, and the contents of this book may indeed "form a remarkable testament to an uncaptive mind," but you can't tell it from the title, which suggests nothing so much a very long series of books to come. Writing that stretch all the way from one year to - the next? Applying the Queenan formula, you would bad-mouth this book even if you really liked it, for fear of being burdened by further installments.

Perhaps it's a mistake to ask for the Book Review to strike the Christmas note. The cover article, which begins in a cascade of print designed to suggest the light cast by the Star in the East that guided the Magi, may be concerned with Christianity, but its connection to Christmas is a last-minute thing, a matter of Jon Meacham' quoting like-minded sentiments from the religious John Cardinal Newman and the agnostic Robert Ingersoll. For the most part, "Tidings" is taken up with Rodney Starks's The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success. This astonishing bit of claptrap hardly deserves such prominent attention from the Book Review. Mr Stark's opus apparently contrasts some very threadbare prejudices about "them" - the emphasis that non-Western faiths allegedly place on "mystification" - with the novel idea, no doubt gagging to philosophes past and present, that Christianity itself, far from partaking of such faults, has been the principal engine of Western superiority because of its commitment to reason. Mr Meacham, whose day job as the managing editor of Newsweek tells us nothing about his background in religious history, faults Mr Stark's book for rampant chauvinism and for a disinclination to consider the very unreasonable things that have been done in Christianity's name, but everything about the review presents The Victory of Reason as an Important Book. It was quite seasick-making to read.

In the last third of his piece, Mr Meacham turns to two other books, neither of which has much to do with Mr Stark's. Taking Religious Pluralism Seriously: Spiritual Politics on America's Sacred Ground, a collection of essays edited by Barbara A McGraw and Jo Renee Formicola, sounds like a good, if possibly to academic and theoretical book. Mr Meacham highlights a contribution by Derek H Davis, "The Baptist Tradition of Religious Liberty," as a work of historical reflection that might well give pause to the highly politicized and rather intolerant religious right of today. Mr Meacham then turns to Prayer: A History, by Philip and Carol Zaleski, but without positively indicating whether the book is a greeting card or a something more serious.

Mr Queenan's Essay reminds me that what I want for Christmas, and not necessarily at Christmas, are recommendations, not books. The last book that I remember receiving as a gift was a devotional tract about Mother Teresa; you can imagine how long that stayed in the house. Mr Queenan manages to stud his complaint about unwanted books with plenty of shafts aimed at well-known titles, Angela's Ashes and The Tipping Point among them; it wouldn't be Joe Queenan writing if he didn't gore at least one of your sacred cows. Whatever your feelings about Dan Ackroyd - actor, musician, writer - you have to admit that you read Joe Queenan because of passages like the following one:

I do not avoid books like Accordion Man or Elwood's Blues merely because I believe that life is too short. Even if life were not too short, it would still be too short to read anything by Dan Ackroyd.

Not to mention (as Mr Queenan does) Hi-Ho Steverino! If you line up the titles that Mr Queenan regards with respect (such as Junichiro Tanizaki's Some Prefer Nettles) with the items on his "still too short" list, a distinction between readerly pleasure on the one hand and packaged information on the other will emerge.

Do you have a problem with gift books? My guess is that the closer you get to reading and writing for a living, the more highly differentiated your taste becomes, such that, aside from reading a few of the books that all the other reading and writing professionals are talking about, you don't require much outside input, and the harder it will be for others to hit upon books that you will want to read.

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Here's hoping that, if you're living in the Western world, in what used to be called "Christendom," you're having a warm and loving Christmas Eve. If this is just another Saturday night, then for heaven's sake, turn off the computer and get out for some fresh air. If you're in New Zealand or Australia, you may be just getting up on Christmas morning - time to head for the beach.

Kathleen and I have had a festive afternoon, reorganizing the linen closet mostly. That's how it ended up. Ironing was involved, as was the 1754 version of Handel's Messiah. In a little while, I'm going to make hamburgers. M le Neveu was to come for Christmas Eve, but he asked if he could come on Christmas instead, and that worked very well for us - allowing us extra time for organizing the linen closet as it did. I made a velouté de champignons for tomorrow's dinner; the main course will be Beef Strogranoff, using a wonderful recipe from Saveur that tops the dish with, of all things, frites! I've made it before, and if it comes out as well tomorrow, I'll publish the recipe. Dessert will be a bûche de Noël from Agata & Valentina; we will shed tears for Madame Dumas, who was last heard of in Queens.

In addition to fending off a cold that can't make up its mind what to do next, I've suffered a pre-holiday depression, wishing that I would magically wake up a few days before New Year's Eve - an uncomplicated holiday involving champagne, caviar, and shouting from the balcony at midnight. And Radio Days; we always watch Woody Allen's Radio Days on New Year's Eve. Christmas I was not enthusiastic about. Would I do the tree thing or not? That's really what Christmas is about, logistically. Either you buy a tree and move the furniture around, or you don't buy a tree and feel embarrassed in the privacy of your own home. Here's how I came to buy a tree.

On Monday, I think it was, I was changing lightbulbs in a ceiling fixture. This is not something that I ought to be doing, because I can't really see what I'm doing, and I took note too late that a small brass collar had unscrewed itself along with one of the lightbulbs. Don't ask me why, but this led to the dreadful pop of a short circuit. Kathleen and I were both traumatized; I'm sure she thought that I was going to drop from the stepstool. On Wednesday, I bought a replacement dimmer switch. By Friday, I'd convinced myself that the whole thing was going to be more complicated than just replacing the switch, but I hung around waiting for a handyman to come and repair a fixture and a dimmer switch that are definitely not building-issued. I should note that the fixture in question illuminates the corridor in which a lot of CDs and DVDs are shelved. Trying to read the spines of CDs and DVDs by flashlight is not recommended: all you get is reflected glare.

So.

The handyman came, and he was one of the methodical Africans, francophone I think, who have joined the building staff in recent years and who prove over and over that plumbing and electricity are universal languages. Which is not the feeling that you get from the very cross and impatient Croatian guy with the shaved head who reminds me of Prime Suspect 6. I was fiddling with something in the bedroom - I never try to read when a handyman is on the premises, but I tie up lots of little loose ends; I must have made seven trips to the garbage chute - when I was summoned. Did I have some glue? The handyman was about to screw on the switchplate, but a painted chip of plaster had come off during the repair process, and if we glued it back on everything would look better. It was as a sidelight that he told me that the fixture was working.

That's when I decided to spend the rest of the day on a tree.

Living where I do, I didn't have to go far to buy one; 86th Street and Second Avenue is an arboreal node at this time of year. I had my fir in minutes. All I had to do - beside moving furniture and so on - was to change the group listing on the auxiliary CD carousel beneath the sofa. I've only programmed two groups: one of jazz copies and one that slots every Christmas CD that we own. Shuffle Play - it's the only way! I was in the Christmas spirit in no time.

But that was yesterday, when I wasn't thinking about the linen closet.

Merry!

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On the Sunday before last, I promised that I would get round to Barry Gewen's essay, "State of the Art," which appeared in the Book Review for December 11. Mr Gewen mentions eight books in the course of his piece, but it is not a review so much as a consideration of the current state of art criticism. Art critics, after all, are the people who tell us about the art world, distinguishing, in the process, the good from the bad, the worthy from the meretricious. What most critics have not been distinguishing, for the past half century, however, is art from non-art. We have been living in an anything-goes art world, largely because critics have resisted the urge to reject, to exclude offerings from the rubric of art.

There are conservatives, of course; Hilton Kramer, founder and still editor of The New Criterion, is an unhesitating debunker of much of what passes for art these days. But as Mr Gewen points out, there are limits to what we can expect of a critic who proclaimed, in 1980, that Juan Miró was the greatest living artist. More typical of modern criticism is the moonlighting philosopher, Arthur C Danto, of The Nation. Mr Danto finds room for almost anything in his big tent, and he writes (as I know from reading him) with an almost amused pleasure about his encounters. His actual philosophy of art is rather more difficult to grasp, which is perhaps as it should be. The question that I came away from Mr Gewen's overview was this: why have theories in the first place?

Continue reading about Art and Criticism at Portico.

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As I was getting dressed this morning, it crossed my mind that a gifted composer and a gifted librettist could take the serial stories that Joe Jervis tells at Joe.My.God and weave an opera of his tales. Joe has just concluded his latest, "The Mommy Box," and it's as strong as any of them.

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Although I didn't expect to see them before Christmas, the two photographs by JR of L'homme qui marche that I'd bought prints of through Flickr were ready to be picked up on Tuesday. As you can see, I chose to frame them together, side by side; for I don't believe that I could ever choose just one of them without eternally regretting the loss of the other. Of all the snaps that I took, the one that I've chosen best captures the warmth of the corner of our bedroom. To see the images themselves properly, look for the thumbnails here and enlarge them. Despite being crazy-cheap, the prints are excellent, capturing all the detail that you can see on screen.

The framer beamed as she brought the frame out. "Everybody likes how it came out," she said. She has said this once or twice before in the course of framing two dozen pictures.

Now begins the scramble. JR's photos take the place of a larger but similarly shaped print that never belonged in the bedroom. It's an extremely austere, fastidiously black-and-white drawing of a railroad bridge somewhere, I should say, not far from Philadelphia. The angle between the humdrum intersection in the left foreground and the rail line, which is indicated by a parade of the pylons from which power lines are suspended. There is neither a vehicle nor a human figure in sight; the more I look at it, the more it seems to capture an industrial ideal that we have abandoned, even though we're still surrounded, here in the Northeast, by its remains. This picture will go into the blue room, where I spend my day, and displace, ultimately, a shadow-boxed platter. The platter, nineteenth-century English pseudo-export, broke cleanly in two one day when something so surprising happened that I no longer recall what it was. It is now one of three or four porcelain survivors of my maladroit manner that hang on our walls.

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Syriana is that rarest of films, the highly-intelligent thriller. Based on Robert Baer's See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism, Syriana does a fine job of laying out the global web of big oil. It is fresh and current. As all such stories must, if they're to be at all true-to-life, Syriana ends on a cynical note; it is in no powerful person's interest to alter current arrangements here or in the Middle East. (It is certainly turning out not to have been in our interest to topple Saddam Hussein.) The acting is uniformly excellent and the writing is first-rate. But what's most commanding about Syriana is its dry, quiet beauty. Violence is often seen but not heard, and the score, by Alexandre Desplat (De battre mon coeur s'est arrêté, the soon-to-open Casanova) is cool and discreet. I don't mean to suggest that Syriana is calm itself; it's anything but. I was truly terrified on at least four occasions - rightly so, in the event. This is not a film to set up a scare and then let you off with a "boo."

There are three stories in Syriana, and they take most of the film to converge, and to reveal themselves as facets of the same story all along. George Clooney is a CIA field man who masquerades as an arms dealer; he becomes concerned when a client in Tehran trots off with only one of two devices; the other seems to slip into Arab hands. Matt Damon is a derivatives trader, based in Switzerland, who makes use of an unfortunate event to establish lucrative contacts with the enlightened heir-apparent to an emirate. Jeffrey Wright is a rising Washington attorney who learns how to play rough without betraying his lessons. All three men swim in extremely dangerous waters - I don't think I've ever worried so much on behalf of a screen lawyer as I did for Mr Wright - and they all learn that any frontal attempt to straighten out the oil mess will only make things much worse. 

I hope that young people will talk about the issues behind this ripping story, and that the dwindling state of oil reserves will register upon the consciousness of coming generations. Competition with China for energy resources is a recurring theme of Syriana, and it probably won't be long before the Chinese turn out to handle the Middle East much better than we'll ever do, so long as we are identified as an active player in Israeli affairs. It was true when I was in my twenties, but sadly it's just as true for those who are in their twenties today: listening to your parents about energy is foolish; they don't get it because they don't want to get it. Young people need to get it before they become overworked, tired, and comfortable.

It is clear to me that humanity's only happy future will require the mastery of stewardship. I cannot imagine how this will happen or what the world will look like when it does, but I foresee plenty of bumps. The main thing, now, is to think about it. I hope that everyone will bear in mind Benjamin Franklin's extremely irreligious advice: God helps those who helps themselves. That's certainly how the earth's material future is going to unroll.

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So, the other night, M le Neveu and I were wondering if Anderson Cooper would ever amount to anything in the news; he was so good in New Orleans but he's so vacant behind a desk, or at least that's what I hear; I've never seen him. It occurred to me that perhaps Mr Cooper ought to take on causes, the way Geraldo Rivera used to do, and M le Neveu said that Anderson Cooper was at least better looking, and I disagreed, adding, impudently, "You know, his name is really Jerry Rivers."

Incredulous, my nephew turned to Google for verification. The short answer is that the urban legend according to which Geraldo Rivera's real name is Jerry Rivers is false. I promise never to mention it again - except in connection with the true story, which is even stranger.

"Gerald Riviera."

You decide.

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The Transit Strike has had an unintended benefit for yours truly that I intend to enjoy loudly and unashamedly. Because Kathleen depends upon her law firm's vans to get to work - and to get home - she had to leave the office at 5:30 yesterday afternoon. Why, when she goes in to the office on weekends she doesn't leave that early! I shall pretend that we're simply having a long weekend until the strike ends. I know that a lot of people are in terrible jams because of the strike, and that this is probably not going to be the most happily-remember Christmas season ever, but I refuse to regret the opportunity to pass normal evenings with my dear wife.

Who, the night before last, forgot that M le Neveu was coming for dinner. "Start without me," she said at twenty past nine. Well, I really didn't want to do that. I don't think that anyone ever wants to do that. So I temporized and she hustled and we sat down at ten, by which time my appetite was a shambles.

I'm inclined to sympathize with the strikers. Working conditions on New York's subways are not very pleasant, and the entire system ought to be rebuilt from scratch. The MTA - a board of flunkies who do the bidding of the elected officials who appoint them, thus deflecting all accountability to the Crab Nebula - has been squeezing workers harder while failing to take infrastructural problems seriously. I mentioned revenge fantasies yesterday in another connection, but declined to reveal them. Here I will say that I think a sort of Place de la Révolution event, with a few guillotines in the public squares, and tumbrils full of the MTA board, the TLC commissioners, and all the taxi-medallion owners who do not drive their own cabs. Oh, and the people who're supposed to bring this dump into the twenty-first century with public toilets! An end to governmental fecklessness, say I!

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President Bush has admitted that he systematically instructed subordinates to violate the law, to wit, 50 USC 1802. He feels that this violation was justifiable, but that's an argument that he would have to make in court - in Congress, at impeachment proceedings. Mr Bush would, of course, prefer to be tried in the court of public opinion, and we'll soon see if that's going to happen. Right now, those of us who dislike and mistrust Mr Bush and his administration are asking ourselves whether trying to stir up a racket would be a good thing.

That's what it feels like to me, anyway. If I can't work up much enthusiasm, it's because the violations - pointless, it seems; the wiretaps could have been imposed lawfully - seem so slight and technical when placed alongside the administration's War on Truth. For the sake of my sense and sanity, I pay the White House as little attention as possible, because it is nothing but a compost heap of disinformation and pep talk. When the president's voice comes over the radio, I rush to mute the sound: his is a voice that makes me want to stand on the rooftop and bellow.

Already I have thought about this matter for longer than is good for me. I begin to see that the fabric of American government has been rent to tatters, and that the executives of large corporations, in the blind pursuit of self-enrichment, will eventually push our economy into the abyss. Language has been so adulterated by fools and scoundrels on the right that the discourse without which a democracy cannot sustain itself will never be resumed.

And I begin to have dark, adolescent revenge fantasies. No, it's not good at all. I must not think about impeaching the president.

I do harbor hope of seeing the man in the dock at the Hague some day. That would be suitable.

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On Friday, Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain came to the nabes, so I ran around the corner to see the first showing. I wanted to get the experience of seeing the movie for the first time behind me as quickly as possible. As it happens, Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana have adapted E Annie Proulx's story of the same name so faithfully that, if you know what Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal look like on screen, then the movie does little more than fill in the color - so far as seeing it the first time goes.

When I saw how faithful Brokeback Mountain is to "Brokeback Mountain," I stopped paying attention to what was going to happen next, and a second story emerged. ...

Continue reading about Brokeback Mountain at Portico.

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In which we have a look at this week's New York Times Book Review.

Fiction & Poetry

Perhaps I ought to point out, every so often, that there are three areas of Book Review coverage that I don't follow: Crime, Science Fiction, and Children's Books.

There, that's out of the way. Now for something truly surprising: a bad review for Nadine Gordimer! Get A Life, reviewed by Sophie Harrison, doesn't sound very inviting. A man afflicted with a variety of thyroid cancer that Ms Harrison assures us is not as deadly as the novelist thinks it is - take that! - a man with cancer goes off to live with his parents so that his wife and son will not be exposed to his radioactivity. Odious comparisons with The Magic Mountain are invited. "Sickness may be a universal human affliction," Ms Harrison writes, "but that doesn't mean each person's experience of it isn't unique. This novel forgets that. I've always felt bullied by Ms Gordimer whenever I've tried out one of her stories in The New Yorker, and I'm not a fan.

Nadine Gordimer, however, is a celebrated writer. First-time novelist Jennifer Vandever is not, and I wonder why reviewer Chelsea Cain was given two-thirds of a page to enumerate the faults of The Brontë Project: A Novel of Passion, Desire, and Good PR. I'd like to stop right there, with the PR crack, but the review itself has a great line. Sara Frost is a Charlotte Brontë scholar in search of a lost letter that will make or break her dissertation. I have learned to dislike this sort of book, of which the following sentence, mutatis mutandis, always seems apt:

There are quotes from Brontë's letters, some biographical trivia, a bit of gossip about an unrequited love - but Sara's devotion to Brontë's work is never entirely believable.

That's because it's literary appliqué, meretriciously tarting up a routine bit of chick-lit. Another tell-tale sign: the bad girl, Claire, is the sparkling character at the center of the satire that Ms Vandever ought to have written.

The symposium at which Claire quotes Yeats, Versace and Donald Trump, all in relation to Princess Diana [her subject], highlights not only Claire's ridiculousness but the inherent perils of taking pop culture seriously at all.

Dawn Drzal's review of Cooking With Fernet Branca, by James Hamilton-Paterson, set off a surprisingly intense siren wail, the one that signals backfiring humor, than which few literary mishaps are more unpleasant. "When going out to dinner with someone you would be relieved to learn had died during the course of the day," runs the note to one of the facetious recipes that stud this novel about one of those Englishmen who dislikes just about everybody. Once upon a time, I found this sort of thing hugely funny. I don't know what happened, but it certainly happened. Now, when I read that note, I'm simply relieved that I'm not likely to have dinner with anyone whom I'd prefer to be dead.

Former counterterrorism official Richard A Clarke has penned a thriller, Scorpion's Gate, that would probably start up a gale of constructive questioning by the people who ought to read it, were they to read it. According to thriller-writer Joseph Finder's review,

The Scorpion's Gate is unlikely to alter American foreign policy and as a thriller it's not going to set anyone's hair on fire. But its geopolitical arguments are no doubt as plausible as any you might find in the President's Daily Brief. Probably more so. After all, whatever his enemies in the Bush administration may say, Clarke's talent really isn't for fiction.

Nice touch, that. Helen Shulman's review of Music Through the Floor: Stories, by Eric Puchner, is a rave. Mr Puchner's tales, she writes,

are told in a classical mode - not groundbreaking in terms of form or content (misfits forced to swim against life's current), but executed with such fluency, constructed with such surprising plot twists and blessed with so many bright, memorable lines that they rise above the contemporary din.

The problem was, I came to Ms Shulman's judgment. She writes with more enthusiasm than appreciation. David Kirby's similarly favorable review of Kay Ryan's new book of poems, The Niagara River, seems more reliable on that score. He places her verse in the tradition of Emily Dickinson and notes that she "cautions us against our strengths rather than our frailties."

Nonfiction

I'm tempted to ignore Hugo Lindgren's review of two new books about video games on the theory that they're science fiction, but that, of course, is exactly what they're not. Imagine how pleased I was to read the editorial suggestion that they "may show us where the whole world is heading." Edward Castranova, author of Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games, is "bullish," Mr Lindgren writes.

Life in these alternative zones may eventually become so fulfilling, he contends, "that a fairly substantial exodus may loom in the distance." He means this, really. Like the Irish and Italians who left their native lands in the late 19th century to come to America, gamers could create a genuine human migration, away from the real and into the virtual. What will be real then?

Heather Chaplin and Aaron Ruby, the authors of Smartboard: The Quest for Art, Entertainment and Big bucks in the Videogame Revolution, are apparently more realistic. They write about an obsessive gamer who frequently loses his jobs and has to move back in with his mother. This is one pastime that I'm grateful I was simply too old for. (Full disclosure: I play FreeCell during interruptions, and I'll play the same hand until I've played every card ("won"), but I have never actually sat down at the computer to play it.)

There are two books about science. One, A People's History of Science: Miners, Midwives, and "Low Mechanicks," by Clifford D Conner, is doomed from the start. I didn't need Jonathan Wiener's review to underline the sad truth about so many of the discoveries that contributed to our comfort and convenience: they were made anonymously and not recorded. There are a few gadgets - zippers, for example - whose invention can be traced, but most cannot, and some discoveries, such as that of bronze, probably required "generations of experimenters." While speculating about such matters, Mr Conner is huffy about Great Men - the Newtons and Einsteins who discovered universal laws of little everyday application. At least our scientific endeavor forms a continuum from theory to practice; in the middle ages, engineers built cathedrals without any input from academics. Mr Clifford is guilty of grudging wishful thinking. Chris Mooney's The Republican War on Science, in contrast, is quite level-headed, even if reviewer John Horgan calls his book a "diatribe, from start to finish." There is simply no question that Republicans have been intervening in what used to be non-partisan projects in order to free enterprise from restriction on the one hand and to pacify religious conservatives on the other. The former is by far the more damaging, because it invariably involves environmental degradation. You would expect a patriarchy to take its stewardship responsibilities seriously, but the one currently running the United States couldn't care less about what human beings will have to cope with fifty years from now. Or perhaps they really do believe their own misstatements and adulterations of language. The Republican War on Science is essential reading for anyone who has just begun to have doubts about the Bush Administration.

In Come Back to Afghanistan, Said Hyder Akbar, a teenager from California, writes, with help from Susan Burton, an editor at "This American Life," about a recent sojourn in his ancestral homeland. His father, Said Fazel Akbar, returned to Afghanistan at the request of his old friend, Hamid Karzai, who appointed him governor of Kunar. His son spent summers with him, and, at the urging of Ms Burton, he kept the audio diary that is the basis of this book. I doubt that there will be many surprises for readers of The Kite Runner, but Mr Akbar does appear to have developed a critical view of the American military presence, which, as usual, is poor at effective communication with the locals. (All I have to do is imagine Manhattan's occupation by troops of undereducated Appalachians, and I'm as good as in Kabul myself.)

Cambridge don Richard J Evans is working on a three-volume look at Nazi Germany; the second, The Third Reich In Power: 1933-1939, looks like a good read for anyone who can stand that sort of thing right now; I'm still recovering from Ian Kershaw's two-volume biography of the Führer. (Under a different administration, I'd have recovered a long time ago; instead, I'm getting worse.) Brian Ladd praises the book but in the end pronounces it "less gripping ... than Shirer's." I'm not sure that being gripping is what a history of fascist misrule needs to strive for. I believe that Professor Evans is a leading opponent of Holocaust-denier David Irving.

On the whole, Luke Mitchell doesn't see the need for The Gang That Couldn't Write Straight: Wolfe, Thompson, Didion and the New Journalism Revolution, by Marc Weingarten. The high-profile journalists that came out of the Sixties had and have little in common beyond the cultivation of distinctive narrative voices; if they are all mildly paranoid, they're not afraid of the same monsters. A book that set out to distinguish these writers from one another would have been much more useful. Of no use whatever is Peggy Noonan's hagiography, John Paul the Great. I didn't know that Ms Noonan grew up in a household of lapsed Catholics, but everything else in Kenneth L Woodward's review was predictable. Why does Ms Noonan bother? Aside from a brief greeting, she did not know the late pontiff, and she has no original scholarship to offer. I have a hard time allowing this book to line up under the nonfiction rubric. "John Paul the Great," writes Mr Woodward,

is as much about Peggy Noonan as it is about the pope - which is probably why her name is in larger print than his on the cover, and in the place where book titles normally appear.

David Leavitt's new book about Alan Turing looks appealing, and I may get it on the strength of Madison Smartt Bell's incredibly good book about Lavoisier, an earlier entry in the Atlas/Norton "Great Discoveries" series. Reviewer George Johnson likes The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer well enough, but he feels that Mr Leavitt did a better job of getting into the mind of one of his fictional characters than he goes of entering Turing's, but I'm not sure that is quite what's required. If Mr Leavitt can make Turing's work as obviously indispensable as Mr Bell made Lavoisier's, then I'll be quite happy.

Neither The Man Everybody Knew: Bruce Barton and the Making of Modern America, by Richard M Fried, nor Crashing the Borders: How Basketball Won the World and Lost Its Soul at Home, by Harvey Araton, gets an entirely favorable review. Michael Kazin is not sure that the world is a better place because of the advertising ministrations of the huckster from BBD&O, much less that he had anything to contribute to the making of America. Upon a second look, I see that I'm wrong as to Mr Araton's book - Alexander Wolff likes it. It cannot be said even now that I have read the review.

Tara McKelvey, an American Prospect editor whom I read in The Nation, rounds up five books for a Nonfiction Chronicle. The first of these is 740 Park: The Story of the World's Richest Apartment Building, by Michael Gross. On all the evidence - not just Ms McKelvey's - this book is too silly to mention. It is what we New Yorkers call "real estate porn," certainly no less salacious than the other kind. How Not To Get Rich: Or Why Being Bad Off Isn't So Bad, by Robert Sullivan. This is not a serious book, either, although it might have been.

Ultimately, the book reads as if it had been dashed off by a guy telling his wife he was a fool not to buy the first apartment they lived in, even though she recognized "an on-ramp to financial security," and not, unfortunately, by a guy who take any of this stuff seriously.

Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage, by Heather Rogers, is one measure of how far we have to go before we start taking stewardship seriously. It might make you think, but it lacks the visual impact of David Macaulay's Motel of the Mysteries. Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin, by Larry Beinhart, ought really to have been called Fog Brain: Trying to Think While Watching Television, but that would have been a different book, I suppose.

The lone history book in the Chronicle fares no better under Ms McKelvey's discerning eye. Court Lady and Country Wife: Two Noble Sisters in Seventeenth-Century England, by Lita-Rose Betcherman, is about offshoots of the Percy family who prospered, after a fashion, during the Stuart Restoration. One was a beauty, the other a prolific mother. On balance, neither was an interesting woman. Ouch!

Pamela Paul's Essay, "What Are They Saying About Me?" discusses authors and the bloggers who write about them. This will be an interesting piece to look back on in five years, by which time the blogosphere will have become far more articulated - organized in regions and levels - than it is now. The essay was compulsive reading for me, needless to say, but it didn't have anything interesting to say about the vineyard in which I'm toiling.

Finally, Byron Calame, the newspaper's public editor, weighed in, in "The Week In Review," on conflict-of-interest procedures at the Book Review. I tried to read it three times but could not make any headway.

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Last night, Kathleen and I got to do something new: we went to the Village Vanguard. We'd never been! We've been to the Blue Note often enough, but never to its venerable downtown rival. It turned out that, all unknowing, we'd been playing Jack Sprat with Miss G. She sounds an habitué of the Vanguard, but has never been to the Blue Note. We'll have to take her there soon, now that she has taken us to the Vanguard.

The Blue Note is basically a storefront operation with a stage in the back - only it's not placed where a stage ought to be. It ought to have its back to the rear wall, but it doesn't; instead, the stage backs on to the rear end of one of the long west wall. It's an odd configuration, and because the tables are set perpendicular to the stage, getting yourself into a good position to see the musicians while watching them is tricky. It's very easy to be much too close or much too far. The Vanguard, in contrast, is an agreeably fan-shaped room, and although all the banquette seats face the middle of the room, and not the stage, the end result, when everybody's seated, is that of an irregular auditorium. I don't know what it's like in the back, but I don't think that sitting too close is a problem.

Pianist Cedar Walton led a trio, with David Williams on the bass and Lewis Nash on the drums, and trumpeter Roy Hargrove appeared as a "special guest." All the musicians were new to me, but they were all gifted pros who knew their way blindfolded through the labyrinths of coherent improvisation. Mr Walton sounded a bit like Keith Jarrett at the start, but with his second number, a commemoration of his mother, he pursued Ellingtonian leads. In short, he is a versatile virtuoso. Mr Williams seemed to have more to say than there were bars to say it in, and he even contrived to command a virtual solo even though Mr Walton and Mr Nash were playing at the time. Mr Nash is a young but masterful drummer, and his big solo, when it finally came, brought down the house.

Roy Hargrove, who warmed up with "The Very Thought of You" on the flugelhorn, and who gradually convinced the audience to wait until he was finished with his beautifully dynamic closes before applauding, is a minimalist who likes to keep his solos short and to the point and then to sit on the sidelines. Such self-effacement is not common among trumpeters (or so Miss G assured us). His warm tone could be bright and snappy when called for, but his musicianship is touched by a sacred beauty that certainly made me want to hear more. As indeed I shall, Tower willing.

The most interesting note of the evening was struck by Miss G herself. She seemed genuinely surprised that Kathleen and I would have a great time listening to great jazz. I don't think that Miss G understands that, as she said at breakfast this morning, Kathleen likes nothing so much as to sit in a small room while people play jazz. I wish we had more time. But one things for certain: Miss G, Kathleen and I have hit upon something that we all like to do.

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Let's try to do this without tiring me out; just dragging the stack of magazines to the computer was wearying.

¶ Granta 91: Wish You Were Here. How long has Simon Gray been scribbling memoirs on the Barbadian strand? This installment is eventually about Mr Gray's friend and colleague, the late Alan Bates; it takes seventeen entries for the piece to reach its subject. Happily, Simon Gray is an adorable procrastinator. Also absorbing was Simon Garfield's memoir of stamp collecting, "The Error World." Not that I've read much, but this is an excellent essay on the pleasures and pitfalls of philately, which all boys ought to be made to take up between the ages of eight and eleven. Stamp collecting is the royal road to mastering geography, and a subtle witness to modern history as well. Mr Garfield, his interest reawakened in middle-ages, teeters on the edge of an obsession with Errors - misprinted stamps - that, now that he can actually pay for them, might ruin him. As long as I'm on this issue, I have to point out Geoff Dyer's short and shocking "White Sands." The shock comes early and resonates right up until the end.

¶ The Atlantic, December 2005. James Fallows has the cover story, "Why Iraq Has No Army." Since I don't want to know any more about the mess over there than I do, or in any greater detail, I skipped what was probably a lucid analysis. Like most Americans right now, I wouldn't know what to do with a lucid analysis. (I'll have more to say about this a little further along the list.) What I did read was Paul Bloom's "Is God an Accident?" Studies of infant and juvenile behavior suggest that we come into the world hard-wired to believe in the supernatural and in a creator. Adults just tone this down and rationalize it - and of course they exploit it for purposes that would never occur to a child. Apparently, we learn about the material world - the one in which rocks fall and things stay where they are until someone moves them - much earlier than we learn about the "social" world's rules.

For those of us who are not autistic, the separateness of these two mechanisms, one for the understanding the physical world and one for understanding the social world gives rise to a duality of experience. We experience the world of material things as separate from the world of goals and desires. The biggest consequence has to do with the way we think of ourselves and others. We are dualists; it seems intuitively obvious that a physical body and a conscious entity - a mind or soul - are genuinely distinct. We don't feel that we are our bodies. Rather, we feel that we occupy them, we possess them, we own them.

According to Mr Bloom, science and religion will always clash, because science makes no room for the duality that most of us (but not all) feel so intimately that we don't notice it. Science says, "that doesn't exist," and we feel robbed. The first lesson of science, of course, is that you don't go by your feelings; they're to be mistrusted at every turn. For lots of people, this is no way to live; it's not nice at all.

¶ In The Nation for December 26, 2005, Sasha Abramsky recounts the charming life story of Charles Graner, the ex-Marine prison guard who, recalled to Iraq, organized the Abu Ghraib follies. Nothing that he did surprises anyone back home in Waynesburg, Pennsylvania. Tara McKelvey writes about the think-tankers and scholars who have developed the Bush Administration's justifications of torture. Barry Schwabsky's long and knowing review of Art Since 1900 will have to wait until I sink my teeth into Barry Gewen's essay, "State of the Art," one of these days when I'm not feeling poorly. In The Nation for December 19, Daniel Lazare reviews two very different books, The Jewish Century, by Yuri Slezkine, and A History of the Jews in the Modern World, by Howard M Sachar. Mr Slezkine's looks to be the more interesting book by far, but it is contentious about Israel and Palestine.

¶ Michael Massing concludes his two-part look at the American media in The New York Review of Books, Volume LII No 20 (December 15, 2005). The first piece concentrated on structural problems, such as corporate ownership; the second focuses on the rot within the profession of journalism itself. What it comes down to, in argument after argument, is a failure of courage. Reporters and, more significant, as gatekeepers, editors, don't want to rouse the wrath of wingnuts.

When NBC cameraman Kevin Sites filmed a US soldier fatally shooting a wounded Iraqi man in Fallujah, he was harassed, deounced as a an antiwar activist, and sent death threats. Such  incidents feed the deep-seated fear that many US journalists have of being accused of being anti-American, of not supporting the troops in the field. These subjects remain off limits.

In other words, we're no better than Turkey, where discussing atrocities that occurred almost ninety years ago is still taboo. If you don't talk about it, it goes away. I wish that Paul Bloom would go back to those cognitive scientists who studied children and see if there's something in our early development that makes denial appear to be a successful strategy. Not that it ever, ever is.

Mr Massing correctly points out that, for one reason or another, the weekly New York Times Magazine is considerably bolder than the daily paper in its Iraqi reportage.

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The other night, Kathleen and I met at Shakespeare & Co's Hunter College branch. She was coming uptown, I down. We cut through the icy winds over to Fifth Avenue and the Frick Collection, for a rare Monday-night members' viewing of the current special exhibition, Memling's Portraits.

Hans Memling is one of the very greatest fifteenth-century Netherlandish painters, in company with Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, and Robert Campin. He died in 1494 at the age of fifty-four, at a moment when Dürer was in his apprenticeship. From the growth on evidence in the exhibition, I think there's no telling how far into the new sensibility Memling would have pushed, but the latest painting in the show reminded me of Holbein. Not that I'm complaining.

The thirty-odd pictures in the show are very choice, and they come from all over the world. The Frick Collection (which owns one of the pictures) is the only American venue for the show - aren't we lucky! To be perfectly vulgar, the show is a cross between the best Met retrospective and a private viewing of the thirty most expensive objects ever sold by Harry Winston. I know that there are still people who feel that what was going on in the Netherlands in the fifteenth century is hopeless primitive when contrasted with contemporary Italian work, and to them I will say that one of the Memlings on view was bought by the Uffizi in the 1830s as an Italian picture.

Sadly, the Frick has put nothing on line, so there's nothing to show or tell, and I haven't yet acquired the catalogue. The pictures hit me strongly in two ways: first, they were so old (and yet in such good shape), and second, everyone was very mortal, even the very well-shaven nabob in the leopard-fur collar who was mistaken for an Italian in the 1830s. Almost all of the faces were cheerful and engaging, but they were all amazingly mortal. Portraits are often designed to survive their sitters, to maintain the illusion that the painted face still corresponds to a living one. That is not true of Memling's portraits. Their mortality is the source of uncanny power.

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Will the cold that has me in its sights kindly attack forthwith or withdraw? Feeling mildly lousy has lost its charm. I shall keep to my bed today; that's as good a place as any to make a dent on the periodicals.

In the evenings, waiting for Kathleen to come home, I usually perk up. Last night, I copied a bunch of LPs onto CDs. The idea is to get rid of the vinyl, but in a few cases I think I'm just going to hold on to the originals. The artwork is too good - Hipgnosis's jacket for Synergy's Cords - or the album is just too dear. At the top of the "dear" list is Ray Parker, Jr's debut album, Raydio, released by Arista in 1978.

By the fall of 1979, "Jack and Jill" had penetrated my general inattentiveness to pop, and I got to think so highly of the song that I would pull over, if possible, and just hear it out. I wouldn't have said this at the time, but now I take "Jack and Jill" to be a parody (possibly unconscious) of an enthusiastic church meeting, with Mr Parker substituting a justification of Jack's errancy for a sermon, with affirmation from the choir. The swelling chords the open the song are particularly churchly.

"Jack and Jill" seems to appear on every "best of" CD that Mr Parker has reissued, but the other songs on Raydio have fallen by the wayside. That's why I'm offering, for your amusement and edification, "Betcha Can't Love Me Just Once." Mr Parker's running trope is that he's the one with the commitment; most of his lyrics would sound just right coming from Aretha Franklin. But his inflection is totally lascivious. Kathleen cites Rick James as an influence. So is Barry White, in whose band Mr Parker was once a sideman. Mr Parker's combination of silk and sin, unusual in a male singer, sounds both serious and gently self-spoofing: he's making fun of himself while he's unbuckling his belt. Betcha can't listen just once. (But you can try.)

Back to bed.

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