Daily Blague

With Schindler's List, I have seen every movie on Mr Emerson's little list save one: W C Fields's 1934 vehicle, It's a Gift. Until just this minute, I was under the impression that It's a Gift wasn't available at the Video Room, but before committing to that here, I thought I'd ask the manager himself, and, sure enough, they've got it. But what I have to say doesn't require me to have seen It's a Gift. I know that I'll find it amusing; I'd have seen it long ago if it hadn't been for a clerk's mistake. What I want to share is the satisfaction of no longer having to watch a lot of uncongenial films. 

When Schindler's List came out, in 1993, I made a decision not to see it - never to see it. This wasn't a vow, but just a decision, which is why I never gave any thought to skipping it. But I put off seeing it until the end. My decision was based on a conclusion that I'd made after seeing Jurassic Park: a joyous filmmaker when he's having fun, Steven Spielberg becomes a manipulative bore when he's dealing with serious material. He does not trust his audiences to think for themselves, but instead wallows in vulgar grandstanding. (And vulgar people eat it up.) However beautifully made, his films are crass. They make you flinch.

As Schindler's List was ending (the parade of "Schindler Jews" and their children was borderline tacky; having identified a few of the people whose characters figured in Thomas Keneally's novelization, he ought to have identified them all - better not to have started), I saw at once that one of the changes that I am going to make to the list (remember, I have five) will be to substitute Alan Pakula's Sophie's Choice (1982) for Schindler's List. The earlier movie is incomparably more powerful. It features one of Meryl Streep's indelible roles - I can't think of a more outstanding performance - and the adaptation of William Styron's novel is one of the most beautifully faithful that I know of. Because the extensive concentration camp scenes focus exclusively on Sophie's concern for her missing child (you still don't know what her choice was), and also because so many scenes take place in the commandant's house, where Sophie is a house slave, the footage is not painful to watch. You open up, beginning to believe that nothing truly bad is going to happen to Sophie - nothing in the way of extermination, that is. It isn't until much later that we flash back to the terrible moment of the choice, which is presented completely out of sequence order. It is the climax of the film, and it packs a terrible wallop. A happy ending to Sophie's story has tugged at our optimism (although Ms Streep's undertones constantly signal otherwise), only to be crushed by a big surprise that fits like the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle. There is not an ounce of sentimentality in the production.

Indeed, thinking about the two films at the same time makes Schindler's List seem very sentimental indeed, but I'm not going to explore the comparison. Mr Spielberg, unfortunately, did not disappoint, and even though I was greatly moved by the story as it unfolded, I was left with the familiar feeling of having been used. I am not sympathetic to Steven Spielberg's cinematic enterprise (the Indiana Jones films excepted), and that's really all that anybody ought to hear me say. I found myself similarly unsympathetic to The Searchers, Intolerance, Modern Times, Do the Right Thing, Dirty Harry, and Easy Rider, so I won't be writing about them, either - except to explain why certain other films deserve to take their place on the list. There are plenty of other films on the list that I saw long ago and don't care to revisit - Fight Club, It's a Wonderful Life, Once Upon a Time in the West - and a few that I have recently revisited without much pleasure, such as Lawrence of Arabia  and Gone With the Wind. I've no interest in trying to persuade anyone that these are not good movies.

(Although I can't resist saying that, to me, the first half of Gone With the Wind is a screwball comedy very incongruously stuck in a blood-soaked epic, while the second half is just awful. Give me Carol Burnett's Went With the Wind any day.)

Did someone say "screwball comedy" in parenthesis? The most curious fact about the list is its implication of Mr Emerson's very unsophisticated sense of humor. I count exactly three screwballs on the list, and one of them, Some Like It Hot is very uncharacteristic of the genre in important ways. (Ernst Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise is very Viennese, but it's no screwball.) Movies such as The Graduate, Singin' in the Rain and Annie Hall are often billed as comedies, but not by me. But even if we include these, the number of comedies on the list does not exceed ten. Only ten percent of the greatest movies are comedies? I don't think so. And where's musical comedy, as in Top Hat? Although I'm not going to put them on this list, The Sting, The Producers (original version), It Happened One Night, Get Shorty, and Born Yesterday all belong on any "hundred greatest" list. So do Peter Sellers, Peter Ustinov, Maggie Smith, Diana Rigg, Alec Guinness and Wendy Hiller, just to name a few of the great British comedians overlooked by Mr Emerson. (Guinness's Obi-Wan Kenobi doesn't begin to count.)

The delivery guy just showed up with It's a Gift. Back to work.

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It's as though I'd been handed a telegram announcing that I'd won a prize. Not a prizey-type prize, such as an Oscar or the Nobel, but a recognition, an honorable mention. The "telegram" is John Gray's review, in The New York Review of Books, of three books by or about Isaiah Berlin.

I've been drawn to Berlin for a long time, but because I'm not a student of philosophy I've had a hard time putting his work in any kind of context. Which is to say, understanding him. I think that John Gray has just handed me a context, however, and I look forward to reexamining The Proper Study of Mankind and Against the Current, the two Berlin titles in my library.

Not too far into his review, Mr Gray appears to complain that Berlin was not more precise, more systematic.

Continue reading about Isaiah Berlin at Portico.

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

Now on appearing on Wednesdays.

Fiction

The novelist Fay Weldon is a gifted writer, but she also works a formula - as do many novelists, even a few at the high end. (Anita Brookner, for example.) She satirizes domestic hypocrisies, and all but mugs along with the story: "Do these people know what they sound like?" Her crazed dénouements are almost easy to swallow, and she never seems to be at risk of falling in love with her characters. What Ms Weldon is not is exploratory: she does not try out different forms. Like the (even more) gifted crime and con specialists, P D James, Ruth Rendell, Ian Rankin, Donna Leon and Carl Hiaasen, Fay Weldon writes fiction along a well-settled trajectory.

The review of the latest Weldon ought to take this into account: how's the old gal keeing up the franchise? But Ann Hodgman writes as though She May Not Leave were a one-off. None of Ms Weldon's other books is mentioned, nor their existence hinted at. Can it be that Ms Hodgman hasn't encountered Fay Weldon before? It seems hard to believe; Ms Hodgman is a wicked satirist herself. (Does anyone remember the column, published I don't know where [Spy?], in which she actually taste-tested doggy treats?) Instead of placing She May Not Leave in Ms Weldon's oeuvre, she rips off the plot and writes a pretty funny précis. Then she complains. Of the jarring effect of the novel's double ending, she writes,

In a way, this shouldn't matter: in Weldon's universe you're not required to worry about the characters. They're just figures being moved around a fairy-tale landscape. But still!

There's the suggestion of familiarity with the world of Weldon in that sweeping generalization, but the review nonetheless fails to tell me what I want to know: is the book up to form or not?

I was also confused - for the first time, by this reviewer - by Liesl Schillinger's piece on the new Monica Ali, Alentejo Blue. In Brick Lane, Ms Ali wrote one of those first novels that are so good that further efforts tend to disappoint. The review does make it very clear that Ms Ali has taken serious steps to disable comparisons: from one woman's poverty in the East End of London, she has moved on to a slice-of-life, multi-focal village in Portugal. And the new book is "a loosely interwoven collection of stories." Ms Schillinger seems reluctant to judge it. By which I mean that she seems reluctant to say that it is not a good book. "The novel isn't a failed experiment, but it is a self-conscious one." What's that supposed to mean? Ms Schillinger's last word is hardly encouraging:

In Alentejo Blue, Ali's characters are trapped in their own heads. To let them loose into the dusty streets of Mamarrosa to act and interact, rather than silently stew, would be a liberation for them - and perhaps for their author.

This makes Alentejo Blue sound suffocated, stillborn. But how can it be that if it's not a failure? This review is polite without being sympathetic.

Lauren Collins's review of Reader, I Married Him, by Michèle Roberts, is no more polite than the novel it covers, but very sympathetic. Of this tale of an English widow at play somewhere in the Mezzogiorno, Ms Collins declares, "Roberts writes with diabolical glee." Sold! That the book may be more than mere entertainment is stipulated at the end:

Roberts has committed her own furta sacra, stealing subjects traditionally reserved for "serious" literature and stealthily developing them in this frothy, ironical romantic caper. Against all appearances, Reader, I Married Him turns out to be an edifying novel of ideas.

Even better, Ms Collins does not expropriate Ms Roberts's story.

Hanna Rubin gives East Wind, Rain, by Caroline Paul, a review that is too distracted to be sympathetic. She devotes a bit too much of her limited space to recounting the real-life event that constitutes the novel's point of departure, and not nearly enough explaining why (not how) East Wind, Rain ought to have a "tragic inevitability." Ms Rubin is far more engaged by the practical difficulties faced by Ms Paul in researching her book than she is in the result. It would have been more judicious to state that the author took her inspiration from history and to have left it at that. The attempt to sell fiction on the strength of interesting facts is always misguided.

Nonfiction

Luc Sante's review of Robert Greenfield's Timothy Leary: A Biography, is everything that a review ought to be, and then some, unfortunately. "Nearly every page is riveting in Timothy Leary, which unfolds like the great novel Sinclair Lewis might have written had he lived to the age of 120." I hope that Mr Greenfield is as thrilled as I'd be if I were in his shoes.

The world needs scoundrels because they make good copy. Leary's life was so incident-filled that it would be difficult to make it sound dull. Still, Robert Greenfield ... does a particularly good job of being at once meticulous and brisk. In addition, the book provides a crash course in several aspects of 60's culture: its often gaseous rhetoric, its reliance on mahatmas and soothsayers, its endless bail-bond benefits, its thriving population of informers, its contribution to the well-being of lawyers, its candyland expectations and obstinate denials of reality, its fatal avoidance of critical thinking, its squalid death by its own hand.

But Mr Sante - or perhaps his editors at the Review - can't resist that "good copy," and the review consists, for the most part, of a lusty account of Leary's life. I'd have admired a more serious concision here. Mr Sante appears to be flogging something here - the social irresponsibility that allowed Leary to hold the spotlight, perhaps. But again, readers are to be encouraged to buy Mr Greenfield's book because it is good, not because Leary was a character. In fact, having savaged the man with his long thumbnail sketch, Mr Sante might be hard put to explain why on earth we'd want book-length treatment. He might have done a better job of showing how Mr Greenfield turned the sordor into "the great novel Sinclair Lewis might have written."

This week's Book Review is fairly heavily weighted with biographical books. Other subjects include JFK, Bess of Hardwick (to whom Kennedy was obscurely related), the Bronfmans of the House of Seagram, Leo Strauss, and the Founding Fathers. Bess of Hardwick may be the one unfamiliar name in this list, but she's as remarkable a figure as any of the other guys. A contemporary of the Virgin Queen's, Elizabeth Hardwick married four times and managed money very well, leaving an architectural legacy part of which is still with us. Mary S Lovell's Bess of Hardwick: Empire Builder gets a review that I'll call "favorable by inference." It is all about Bess, and yet Mr Goodheart fails to make an interesting connection (the source of the JFK relationship, for more of which, read the next review): One of Ms Lovell's other subjects, Deborah Mitford, married one of Bess's descendants.

How the Kennedys got to be pals with the Cavendishes is one of the many threads in Jack Kennedy: The Education of a Statesman, by Barbara Leaming. Geoffrey Wheatcroft's review is somewhat unsympathetic. It's of the opinion that the author tries to hard to push her theory, which is that the young JFK was shaped by Churchill. Mr Wheatcroft notes that "Churchill can be cited on both sides of many arguments, often misleadingly," and concludes that "Churchill deserves to be given a rest." For the rest, it tells the admittedly fascinating story of the three eldest Kennedys before, during, and right after World War II. Their father, Joseph, was US Ambassador to the Court of St James, doubtless the most shameless impersonation of his career. (He thought that the British ought to make a deal with Hitler.) His daughter, Kathleen, known as "Kick," charmed her way into blue-blooded circles, where her breezy American spirit was greatly prized by the young men. She married one of them (another son of Bess), and although devastated by the deaths of her husband and brother in 1944, she stayed on in England, involving herself with another nob, one arrogant enough to get the two of them killed in a plane crash in 1948. Meanwhile... was this book supposed to be about JFK?  

Another family to emerge from the Twenties in great shape for surviving the Depression was that of Samuel Bronfman, whom Prohibition made a rich man. The House of Seagram became positively prestigious under the guidance of his son, Edgar, but then it was doomed by the hubris (and incompetence) of Edgar Jr. Frank J Prial, sometime wine critic for the Times (alcohol is alcohol?), writes favorably of Nicholas Faith's The Bronfmans: The Rise and Fall of the House of Seagram, noting that Mr Faith's "years at The Financial Times and The Economist" enable him to tell the Fall part of the story extremely well. Mostly, though, Mr Prial talks about the Bronfmans "It's still a great story."

Leo Strauss was a highly influential political philosopher at the University of Chicago in the Fifties and the Sixties. Some of his pupils, and many of his pupils' pupils, have migrated to Washington and seized power as neoliberals. They have given the man a bad name in many circles, and Steven Smith sets out to clarify Strauss' true legacy in Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism. According to Robert Alter, the book is "admirably lucid" and "meticulously argued," and it paints the portrait of a complicated man who emerged from a complicated mileiu: "1920's German Jewry." I suspect that nobody would be writing about Strauss if it weren't for the deformations wrought in his name by Wolfowitz & Co.

The Founding Fathers are the subjects of two recent books. One of them "more important" than the other, according to reviewer Jon Meacham. The important book would be Gordon S Wood's Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different. The title pretty much says it all: what the Founders shared, and what motivated them to do what they did, was an obsession with Character. Mr Meacham thinks that Mr Wood does a fine job of explicating the concept of character, which was far more nuanced and complex at the end of the eighteenth century than it is now. Character, far from being the "true self" revealed under pressure, was for the Founders an objective pursued with every hope of winning fame and renown. A man of character acted well in order to be thought well of. Perhaps we're not going to have any real leaders until we give up this crap about "authenticity." We are all "authentically" crooked timber. As for Richard Brookhiser's What Would The Founders Do: Our Questions, Their Answers, the title once again speaks volumes. Mr Meacham praises it for making the Founders "accessible" - a dubious achievement - but he cannot clear the book of the pong of extreme triviality.

Finally, a book of memoirs, Joseph Volpe's The Toughest Show on Earth: My Rise and Reign at the Metropolitan Opera (written with Charles Michener). I know only one thing about Mr Volpe's reign at the Met: it made me stop wanting to go to the opera. So don't expect me to read this "self-serving" tripe. Anthony Tommasini's review of Mr Volpe's career is fawning; it tends to applaud whenever Mr Volpe acts like Rudy Giuliani. As for the memoir, there's not much to say. "When it comes to his personal life, Volpe does little soul-bearing." If I want to hear more about Joseph Volpe, he's the last person I want to hear it from.

Is our next book also a memoir? Sarah Churchwell's review convinces me that the original, British, subtitle of Justine Picardie's My Mother's Wedding Dress - The Fabric of Our Lives - is a lot more accurate than the American substitution, The Life and Afterlife of Clothes. That far I got.

A former features editor of British Vogue, Picardie uses fashion, however broadly construed, as her version of Proust's madeleine, the occasion to go in search of lost time and lost people. The result is a series of brief essays that eagerly wander down any conceptual path that can somehow be associated with style. (Or even if it can't....

Because I can't get a sense of what Ms Picardie has set out to do, I can't tell if the review is sympathetic or not. Is the book lighthearted or harebrained? If I hold the review sideways, I sense a rather funny book here, but Ms Churchwell makes no mention of wit.

Four books about "current affairs" are reviewed. Two of them would seem to be more related than in fact they are: Matthew Levitt's Hamas: Politics, Charity and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad, reviewed by Steven Erlanger, and Terror on the Internet: The New Arena, the New Challenges, by Gabriel Weimann, reviewed by Robert F Worth. Mr Worth thinks that Mr Weimann spends too much time on the bogus threat of cyberterrorism without coming down on one side or the other on the debates that the fear of cyberterrorism has generated. As for the role that Web sites play in spreading jihad, Mr Worth does not report anything to suggest that Mr Weimann would tell me something major that I don't already know. Frankly, so long as there are terrorist sites, I'll know that the Web is being honestly run. Inside Hamas appears, from Mr Erlanger's unsympathetic review, to be a tendentious screed that fails to explain just why Hamas has won so much public support in Palestine. "It's safe to say that Hamas won't be the last word on the subject."

Noam Chomsky isn't satisfied by calling a spade a spade; he wants to hit you with it. His Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy is an inflammatory denunciation of the United States, which is a failed state because it doesn't fails "to provide security for the population, to guarantee rights at home or abroad, or to maintain functioning (not merely formal) democratic institutions." Mr Chomsky is technically correct, in my view, but "fierce excoriation" hardly seems to be what's needed. (Is there any evidence that the Hebrew prophets were influential in their own time? Rather not.) Jonathan Friedland's sympathetic review carefully notes the book's faults (which, aside from the fierce tone, don't seem particularly serious), but concludes, 'It's hard to imagine any American reading this book and not seeing his country in a new, and deeply troubling, light." If I thought that were true, I'd give up writing about anything else.

I'd give up writing altogether if I thought that books like Big Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America's Energy Future, by Jeff Goodell, were useful. I agree with all of Mr Goodell's propositions - coal is dirty, air pollution is toxic, global warming will be disastrous, and so on and so on - but I don't stop there. I want to know more about why it's going to be so difficult for humanity to reverse course on consumption and degradation. And a paleoconservative corner of my heart is glad that it will take a while for us to do anything but burn more fossil fuels: we don't know enough about either the world or ourselves to grasp a progressive solution. Reviewer Corey S Powell seems to have a much better idea of what this might be than does Mr Goodell. So I'm grateful for his review.

John Updike's Essay, "The End of Authorship," is something of a headache. One wants to say, there, there, Gramps, it's not going to be as bad as all that. It was probably a bad idea to base an essay on loopy predictions made in the previous week's Times Magazine, notoriously fertile terrain for sprouting nonsense. Kevin Kelly, of Wired, had written,

Once digitized, books can be unraveled into single pages or be reduced further, into snippets of a page. These snippets will be remixed into reordered books and virtual bookshelves.

Doubtless the technology will be there, and doubtless there will be plenty of fools to exploit it senselessly. I have found, however, that familiarity with technology gently renders my reliance upon it more sparing. I insert far fewer hyperlinks, for example, into my blog entries than I used to; I came to find clusters of them distracting, and I also found myself eager to type my own ideas into the Google search box. I could enable your ADD by linking the titles of the books mentioned here to the reviews at the Times's site; my hunch is that, if you're really interested, you'll find your way to them readily enough without the gadget. Perhaps I'm just hopelessly old - but I'm not as hopelessly old as John Updike, who cringes at the prospect of the writer as a performer. I don't care much for it, either, but thinking back on the writers whom I've heard read during the past year - Jane Smiley and Joan Didion among them - I don't think that "performance" is the word that I would use in any case. It's wonderful to hear an author read her own work; it ought to be required for every poet to record hers. Du calme, Mr Updike; du calme.

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A classical-music radio station in Kilgore, Texas, will be converted to a Christian Lite format when Kilgore College, a community college, sells the station to a California-based chain, according to a Times story by Daniel J Wakin, "In Texas, Fighting to Keep Brahms on Air." This is terrible news for the 15,000 or so local people who listen to KTPB, but as business-as-usual in radioland it is bad for all of us. The concentration of media outlets ought to be illegal. It ought to be against the law to have access to more than one frequency on each band. (The New York Times has always seemed to be happy with its single AM and FM stations.) Absolutely no one benefits from media concentration.

What's that? You say that "stockholders" benefit? Not to be Marxian, but your contention is highly alienated. Where do these stockholders live? Insofar as they, too, reside in the United States, they live in a degraded environment. They are hooked, perhaps, on the delusion of the gated community, which holds that wealthy people can create walled-off Utopias, and that it therefore that doesn't matter what kind of a world their less affluent countrymen have to be content with.

As for the loss of a classical music outlet in particular, I'm reminded of one of the few passages in Plato's dialogues that has struck me as appealing.

And harmony, which has motions akin to the revolutions of our souls, is not regarded by the intelligent votary of the Muses as given by them with a view to irrational pleasure, which is deemed to be the purpose of it in our day, but as meant to correct any discord which may have arisen in the courses of the soul, and to be our ally in bringing her into harmony and agreement with herself, and rhythm too was given by them for the same reason, on account of the irregular and graceless ways which prevail among mankind generally, and to help us against them.

That's from the Timaeus, 47d (translated by Benjamin Jowett).

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This is to announce a group reading of Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, to begin two week from today, on Monday, 10 July. Joining me at the outset will be Ms NOLA and JKM, and we've all read the book once already, but you are welcome - nay, encouraged! - to join. I don't know what the pace will be, but I prefer to keep it on the slow side.

Having experimented with group readings before, I'm still experimenting. This time, I'd like to try the following very simple procedure. Simply write your comments as email and send them to me at portico@mindspring.com. I will post them directly, as entries at the Daily Blague.

If you haven't read this gripping, horrifying and finally transcendent novel, now's a good time (the book has come out in paper). If you have read it, you're probably like Ms NOLA, JKM, and me: you want to experience "the second time" - which, in this case, will probably prove to be a lot more different from the first time than most.

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Chapters Four and Five of Cities and the Wealth of Nations deal with complementary phenomena - regions that farmworkers leave, and regions that farmworkers get kicked out of - and show how the health of cities predicts which phenomenon will occur.

In "Regions Workers Abandon," Jacobs visits several regions where life hasn't changed much, except with regard to population. She gets right to the point.

The difference between stagnant regions that lose populations and stagnant regions where people stay put is simply that people from places like Scranton, Wales, and the deserted parts of Ontario can have realistic hopes of doing better somewhere else and have the means to get there, while people in such stagnant places as Haiti, where most people stay put, lack a way of getting out or a place to go.

Ingeniously, Jacobs hits on a perverse way of proving her point. She focuses on Napizaro, a town in Mexico, that (at the time of writing, at least) looks as though its economy is improving because so many houses are in good shape, and the public infrastructure has been greatly improved. But the economy of Napizaro must be subsumed within the economy of North Hollywood, California, because that is where Napizaro's men go to work, usually in clothing factories. Their abandonment of Napizaro is qualified. They themselves have left, but their families remain behind. living on remittances.

Like the men of Napizaro, you will be asking why, given such industriousness, they could not do the same work...

Continue reading about Cities and the Wealth of Nations at Portico.

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"Learn something new every day," says Kathleen, speaking of life with me. If she were only a bit younger, she could learn five things a day at least, if she hooked up with Nate Mattison, a recent graduate of Byram Hills High School in Westchester. According to Peter Applebome's story, "A Teenager Who Actually Does Know It All," Mr Mattison (headed for Yale) has won a place in the Hall of Fame of the Academic Quiz Bowl, and he generates a "brainiac vibe." At his age, I knew nothing more than the succession of the kings and queens of England (with dates). I still don't know the American Presidents.*

What is it with competitive quizzes and spelling bees? They seem to have come out of nowhere. When I was a boy, such contests were dying institutions, or seemed to be - a mistaken impression, evidently. I was pretty good at spelling bees - I remember the words that I flubbed, such as "committee" and "buffalo" - but I don't remember anyone conducting after seventh grade, and even then they weren't the big deal that they had been. Unlike today's bees, the competition was confined to words that an educated person might use, not the rarities, such as "oppidan,"** that would litter the film, The Bee Season, if it were really about spelling bees.

But The Bee Season is about the Kabbalah. I think. Kathleen rented it last night. I can't recall seeing a more pointlessly mystifying movie in my life. Eventually, I realized that it is just the Jewish Da Vinci Code. The performances were all superb, but trying to figure out what was bothering Juliette Binoche's character - well, I'm not sure that I ever did. And the hole Hare Krishna tangent reminded me of The Serial, a far more genial film.

*I'm okay from Washington to van Buren and from Cleveland's second term. I'm sound on Buchanan through Hayes. How about you? (Assuming, of course, that the matter has any relevance.)

**Unrecognized by my spell-checker, this term can mean "urban" or "townsman." You'd think it would come in handy, just for variety's sake, in my neck of the woods. It doesn't.

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New York City will be laboring beneath a weather front for a few days, according to forecasts. It was supposed to rain yesterday, and it did, a little, in the evening. I wore my rainy-day shoes to the Metropolitan Museum, but I didn't need them. Walking home, I got soaked from within. It wasn't very hot, nor was it very humid, and there was an intermittent breeze, but it was hot and humid and still enough to generate a good sweat.

At the museum, Ms NOLA and I saw a lot of things in passing, as one necessarily does if one begins with lunch in the basement cafeteria, but we made it a point to see the tribute to Susan Sontag's critical work, On Photography, and we also went up onto the Roof Garden. Ms NOLA hadn't seen the very various installations of Cai Guo-Qiang that decorate the garden this summer; if she had, I'd have cautioned us away from what turned out to be an elevator bottleneck with lots of cross passengers. (Only one of the elevators was working.) The photographs in the Sontag show were among the most celebrated images in the history of the medium, which makes it a real shame that the museum didn't work up a small catalogue. Like the catalogue that the museum didn't prepare to accompany the Kara Walker show (still on exhibit), this needn't have been an expensive production, but something more like a book.

At the Sontag, it occurred to me that the boy in the famous Diane Arbus image - you know, the kid in the plastic boater and the bow tie, wearing "Bomb Hanoi" and "Support Our Troops" buttons, the guy who is still my image of Crazy Conservatism - must have been about my age, or even younger. (The fact took so long to register, because, without those buttons, you'd take picture to be much older than 1967.) I wondered what might have become of him, and what he's up to these days, if he's still alive. 

***

Summer Hours - running around town (but often no further than the Met - with Ms NOLA on Friday afternoons - will require some changes in the schedule around here, for those of you who are aware of a schedule. Most notably, I will see my Friday Movies on Monday (unless Ms NOLA is busy). Secondly, and more permanently, my review of The New York Times Book Review will appear on Wednesdays. Working on the review on Monday and Tuesday will give some structure to the beginning of the week, always a tricky time for me (I have a tendency toward inertia on Monday; does anybody else?), and of course I'll get my weekends back.

***

Édouard, at Sale Bête, has the patience to scroll through all the comments to an entry by Kevin Drum at Political Animal, among which he finds one that truly gives me pause. The entry, and most of the commenters, are firmly opposed to the torture of prisoners. In comes someone who styles himself "Freedom Phukher," who makes the following terse comment:

This is why you losers lose! You want to be right, while a near majority (+Diebold) just want to feel macho and potent!

"Near majority" aside, I believe that this is true of a great many Americans. I suspect that it is an unconscious wish for many, or at any rate one that's sufficiently surreptitious to square with "Christianity." But I pause to consider the delusion of "macho and potent" in the context of torture. What's macho and potent about fighting someone who can't fight back? True potency stops the moment someone is constrained, and this is something that all good men understand. "Macho and potent" means "evil" here - but then FP implies exactly that.

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Follow-up to yesterday's Mysteries of Yorkville entry: I ought to have enlisted Kathleen before announcing defeat. Known as the Spider Woman of Wall Street, Kathleen also ought to be recognized as the Ferret of the Internet. (We've actually talked about her going into business as a sort of Ask Jeeves.) Not only did she find support for my conviction that York Avenue, formerly Avenue A, was renamed after Sergeant Alvin Cullum York, World War I hero, but she uncovered the date: 1928. Who knew that 1928 was also the birthday of "Sutton Place"?

From the Times (scroll down a bit).

From NYC Streets (scroll down almost to the bottom).

And, feeling zesty myself, I went on to ask the Internet how to pronounce "Coenties," as in "Coenties Slip," the name of a street that runs from the East River (more or less) to Pearl Street, in way-downtown Manhattan. Rebecca Mead, of The New Yorker, reports the answer (I must have missed the "Talk" that week), but not at the magazine's site. Any Nederlanders out there want to pitch in?

"Quinches."

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Thomas Meglioranza has been writing for a while about his arduous preparation for the role of Prior Walter, in Peter Eötvös's operatic adaptation of Tony Kushner's Angels in America. The work, mounted by the Boston Modern Orchestra and Opera Boston, received its American premiere last Friday. The critics came on Saturday night (I'm told), and they seem to have liked the work. They are quite unanimous about Tom: everybody liked his performance very much. It was from the reviews, and not from the baritone, that I gathered that his role was something like the lead. Congratulations, Mr Meglioranza!

I had not thought of writing about the event, however, because I didn't see it myself. I have never seen the play, and I have no idea what Mr Eötvös's music sounds like. But as a fan of Tom's I was eager to read the reviews, and one of them, which appears on the writer's Web log in advance of publication in MusicalAmerica, set me on a line of thought that at first seems quite depressing. The blog in question is Steve Smith's Night After Night.

Scrolling down through Mr Smith's recent entries, I was of course aware that I was visiting a journalist's site. It is in the nature of journalism to track the new, and I'm not surprised that, when Mr Smith lists the classical music that he's listening to, the recordings are all new, or, at least, out-of-the-way. Music critics don't have to go back; fresh performances are always welling up about them. What did strike me as incongruous, however, was the jumble of genres. For someone of my age, there is something decidedly transgressive about talking about both Jordi Savall and Ornette Coleman with much the same kind of admiration. What I realized, finally, was that the transgressiveness has entirely disappeared.

Steve Smith's wide-ranging taste is beginning to look like a certain kind of norm for listeners half my age. It's a much bolder taste, but it's also, I think, somewhat less reflective. It mirrors the voracious appetite for any food but mom's that seems to be required of today's hip New Yorkers. Sometimes I don't quite believe that the enthusiasm is real - it can't be! - but then I recollect what a very different musical world today's thirtysomethings grew up in. First, music became less political after 1970 - does anyone remember Ellen Willis proclaiming the "death of rock"? - and correspondingly less grimly embraced. Second, recordings poured in from everywhere to the racks of Tower Records. (I suspect that computerized inventories made the swelling possible.) When I was young, there was always a handful of guys who admired Beethoven's Late Quartets and Miles Davis equally, but, for the most part, they were showoffs of understatement. Genres were ghettos; they had a lot to do with what sort of friends one made.

Of course, I've also become an old person who finds it increasingly difficult to keep up with lots of new names. And knowing that I will never have an iPod is sobering. I can't imagine listening to music anywhere but in my rooms. Yet no one was a more passionate user of the Walkman when it first appeared. In other words, I haven't got anything against iPods. I just wouldn't use one now. I hate to say it, but it's something that I've outgrown, like the taste for swimming.

I prefer, that is, to think of it as a matter of outgrowing - as opposed to senescing. I'm no longer driven to listen to recordings all day long, partly because all this Daily Blague-related reading and writing requires my undivided attention, but partly too because my head is already stuffed with wisps of lovely music. They're muffled and unobtrusive, but very pleasant nevertheless. Sometimes, I have to play recordings just to impose some law and order.

I ought to get out more. Last spring, Ms NOLA made a compilation for me that, when I got round to listening to it, I was tempted to turn off in the middle of every cut. But I hung on, and was wowed at the end, by what turned out to be the first two cuts of Rufus Wainwright's Want One. I got the album pronto, but not before being lured into buying Want Two by the promise of an enclosed DVD - in which Mr Wainwright sings most of Want One's songs at the Fillmore. The first song on the DVD, however, is not one of Rufus's. He never says whose it is, and I always wonder what different things the members of the audience made of it. I knew just what to make of it: the marvel of Rufus Wainwright's turning Absence, by Hector Berlioz (from Les nuits d'été) into a contemporary torch song.

Welcome to the present.

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The culprit, if culprit he be, appears to have been George Patullo, a Saturday Evening Post writer who heard a great story that two corporals told him at a first aid station. Shortly before, on 8 October 1918, they and another corporal, Alvin Cullum York, of Tennessee, had taken out a band of German gunners who stood in the way of the Allied advance, in a French valley near Châtel-Chéhéry. By the time Patullo filed his story, York had achieved victory single-handedly. 

Mr. Patullo chose to focus on Sergeant York, presumably because of the tighter, richer narrative his story allowed. The article, titled "The Second Elder Gives Battle" in a reference to his position in his Tennessee church, tells the story of an uneducated backwoods Christian who reluctantly goes to war and reconciles his religious beliefs with his sense of duty to his country.

York became a celebrity overnight and was promptly promoted to the rank of sergeant. In 1941, Warner Bros released Sergeant York, for which Gary Cooper received an Oscar. There were always murmurings, however, that York wasn't the only hero of Châtel-Chéhéry, and now as Craig S Smith reports ("Revisiting Sgt. York and a Time When Heroes Stood Tall") in the Times, two forensic teams are trying to establish the facts, with metal detectors and GPS. There is no doubt of York's valor - just of the extent of it.

And my point was? For I don't know how long, I've understood that Sergeant York gave his name to my neighborhood, and I was just investigating the matter when I found that the evidence has disappeared. I didn't make it up, but neither the Internet nor the (far from exhaustive or comprehensive) Encyclopedia of New York, Kenneth T Jackson, editor, explains how an area that used to be known as "Germantown" - settled by Central Europeans long before the land to the south was developed - came to be called "Yorkville." I can't even find out when the nomenclature was changed.

I do know that York Avenue started out as Avenue A. It is a geometric continuation of the street with the same name in Alphabet City, and this is chiseled into the cornerstone of PS 158, on York between 77th and 78th Streets. At some point, the name was changed, and the high noon of Sergeant York's celebrity, at the end of World War I, would have been around the right time. Heavily German, the neighborhood had spent the war under a cloud, and it would have made a lot of sense for local worthies, wishing to dissociate themselves from the Kaiser, would have seized upon the vanquisher of a unit of German snipers as a rousing sign of their loyalty to Uncle Sam. There would have been the coincidental advantage that "York" was already a familiar word to non-Anglophones. I am fairly sure that this is what happened, and I'm also sure that I learned it from a Web site some years ago. But now there is only silence.

Alvin York declined to take advantage of his fame, and retired to the obscurity whence he came, in Pall Mall, Tennessee, and where he remains something of a local hero. One of the several Web sites devoted to him shows the picture atop this entry and labels it 'With the Tennessee Society of New York in 1919 at the welcoming home ceremonies."

An information brownout - ahimè.

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When it comes to the simple things in life, I am inflexible.

This entry has been republished at Portico.

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In her 1965 essay, "The Imagination of Disaster," Susan Sontag took a look at science fiction films and analysed their formulas. The following insight has stayed with me over the years:

One gets the feeling, particularly in the Japanese films but not only there, that a mass trauma exists over the use of nuclear weapons and the possibility of future nuclear wars. Most of the science fiction films bear witness to this trauma, and, in a way, attempt to exorcise it.

I thought of this over the weekend, during which we watched both Spider-Man movies. Ms NOLA had recommended them, persuasively, to Kathleen, and I was so tired of watching uncongenial films that I put up no resistance, even though I don't go in for superheroes at all. Both films were better than I thought they'd be, but I still had plenty of cerebral RAM left over for wondering what anxieties the need for superheroes might express. The appeal of superheroes is obvious - indeed, that's part of the problem for me - but I could sense a need for them, too. A need for superheroes to be bodied forth in film, and for them to confront - what, exactly? What are we afraid of?

I quickly learned not to ask the question in the first person plural. Just as superheroes are solitary, so are the fans who dream about them, no matter how many are packed into the same theatre. What am I afraid of? What would I be afraid of if I were a normally healthy young man with a job that may or may not have ripened into a career? And I saw at once that what I would be afraid of would be the power of a superior, at any level, to array himself in all the resources of a large corporation in order to annihilate me in my utter defenselessness. There would nothing social in this fear; indeed, the fear would be intense to the extent that I felt alone, as young men often do and in fact are. It's important also to see that the villains are individual human beings, not "corporations." Corporations are fictitious persons, their identities - and their assets - operated by individual men and women. The corporation is simply a neutral superpower. It allows someone else to overpower me completely.

I was doubtless helped to these conclusions by the two Spider-Man pictures, for in both cases the villain is given unchecked access to the resources of a company run by Norman Osborn. Indeed, Norman Osborn is the first "victim" of this transformation, which he undergoes in a fit of recklessness that is even so not malignant. The transformation of Dr Otto Octavius in the second film is even more dramatic, because, unlike Osborn, Otto is loving and thoughtful at first. But his experiment misfires, too, putting him under a sort of portable house arrest. We can fairly say that both men are corrupted when they connect themselves directly to the corporation's power. Similarly, real-world corporate power is known to corrupt corporate officers; the Enron debacle shows what happens when there aren't any superheroes.

Corporate power and authority are wielded with whispers and strokes of pens. Superhero films dramatize corporate action by telescoping the power-at-a-distance nature of business and rendering its impact in visually violent terms. Superhero villains don't really want anything except what all businesses want: sales and clout. What sets the villains apart isn't so much the terrible damage that they wreak but their willingness not to play fair.

As regular readers know only too well, I could go on and on. But I think I'll stop right here, mindful of my unacquaintance with the superhero genre. And on.

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Welcome to modern times. What I am doing this morning is reading the blogs and Web sites of people who will be interviewed later today as prospective housemates of a friend of mine in Brooklyn. I ask you: how weird is that?

How weirdly wonderful?

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Self-Explanatory

For ages, Ms NOLA has been telling me that I have to come to Brooklyn to see her apartment and visit her neighborhood. In a broad sense, it used to be my neighborhood, but only briefly: the summer of 1980. I rented an apartment in Park Slope and studied for the bar. When Kathleen got her own place in the fall (a studio two floors down from where we live now), I very unofficially moved in with her, and went to Brooklyn only rarely, but I kept the apartment until shortly before our wedding in October, 1981. If I liked Park Slope, I loved Prospect Park. Connoisseurs say that Prospect Park, the project that Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux worked on after Central Park, is the better creation, and connoisseurs are right. One has only to gaze at the Long Meadow to sink into a state of peace and serenity. On a sunny afternoon in June, that is.

A stroll through the western edge of Prospect Park was the last leg of a walk that Ms NOLA and I took ...

Continue reading about Park Slope at Portico.

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

Commenting on my Book Review review of two weeks ago, Tom Lutz, author of Doing Nothing, chided me for being "a person lazy enough to review books by reading reviews of them" and then assured me that I would therefore find "many kindred spirits discussed" in his book. His misunderstanding is worth pointing out: I am not reviewing books here. I am reviewing the reviews that appear in The New York Times Book Review. And the undertaking has proven to be keenly instructive, which is why I devote lovely weekends to the job. (Note to self: consider publishing this piece on Wednesdays.) There are so many, many ways in which to write bad reviews!

It was, therefore, with warmly welcoming arms that I received John Updike's five rules of reviewing, published in a collection of essays, Picking up the Pieces, in 1975. John Freeman, at Critical Mass - a blog maintained by the directors of the National Book Critics' Circle - posted an entry about the rules, to which Updike appended a "vaguer sixth," and links to this entry sprouted like mushrooms. I flatter myself that I've been groping my way toward a very similar set of principles, simply because Mr Updike's rules throw into relief the objections that I have to so many of the reviews that appear in the Review. I paraphrase:

¶ Do not scold writers for failing to write the book that you have in mind.

¶ Quote amply, with at least one long passage. The quality of prose is like any other aesthetic object: it cannot be grasped indirectly. The reviewer's guarantee of great writing is empty; I have to see for myself.

¶ Back up critical judgment with specific quotation.

¶ Do not summarize the book's contents. Repeat: DO NOT SUMMARIZE.

¶ Give examples of books that succeed where, if it be the case, the book at hand fails.

As for the "vaguer sixth," I quote.

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser. Do not accept for review a book you are predisposed to dislike, or committed by friendship to like. Do not imagine yourself a caretaker of any tradition, an enforcer of any party standards, a warrior in an ideological battle, a corrections officer of any kind. Never, never (John Aldridge, Norman Podhoretz) try to put the author "in his place," making him a pawn in a contest with other reviewers. Review the book, not the reputation. Submit to whatever spell, weak or strong, is being cast. Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.

If these are my objectives whenever I write up a book, they're doubly binding when I review the Review. First, I judge reviews by their light. Then I try to follow them when I write, and to do so scrupulously (and at length) wherever I feel that a book of moment is under discussion.

I bought Mr Lutz's book, of course, but I wish that he'd left an e-mail address so that I could reply more personally. Personal replies will have to wait until I have finished Doing Nothing and can write to him at his publisher, FSG. 

Fiction

John Updike happens to be on the cover of this week's review, at least in the form of a jolly caricature by Stephen Savage. The review of his latest novel, Terrorist, is by Robert Stone, and it's the first favorable review that I've come across. This is probably because Mr Stone takes Mr Updike's first rule very seriously.

Ahmad's religious instruction provides the opportunity from some long discourses on Islam in the modern world, one of the didactic areas of the novel that some readers may not have much patience for. But these dialogues, along with the reflections they provoke in Ahmad, serve Updike's intentions - the examination of contemporary America exposed to the passions in the non-American world.

This is just about perfect. It takes an aspect of Terrorist that many readers (and reviewers) might consider a defect, simply because they don't care to read "discourses," and instead of complaining about it reminds us that, sometimes, discourses are just what is called for. Readers who are bored by extended intellectual discussion are forewarned to seek pleasure elsewhere. Mr Stone takes Mr Updike's intentions at face value, and finds that he lives up to them ably.

Of the five other novels that are treated in four reviews, Alan Furst's The Foreign Correspondent gets the lengthiest treatment. Alex Berenson's review is just about as disappointed as all the other reviews that I've come across have been. They all say the same thing: Mr Furst is a capable and "professional" novelist, but he is no Graham Greene or John Le Carré. No sooner does Mr Furst begin to achieve a measure of celebrity than he is shot down for failing to be someone else! "Beautiful writing alone does not make a novel great." What an impossibly pretentious thing to say, assuming as it does that Mr Berenson has it in his gift to bestow the label of greatness upon a book. What Mr Berenson wants to say is that, because The Foreign Correspondent is not great, it's not any good. This is precisely the sort of review that John Updike argues against right off the bat. To make his review even worse, Mr Berenson declines to quote one of our most atmospheric writers at any length.

Jay Parini reviews two novels that, coincidentally, take off from the same bit of history: in the conquest of Mexico, Hernán Cortés was assisted by an Aztec princess who is now known as "La Malinche." Perhaps the joint review is a bad idea, because it's only too human to judge the book that says less to you by the light of the book that says more. Mr Parini likes Frances Sherwood's Night of Sorrows very much, finding it "a song itself. ... The linguistic and narrative riches of the book enhance its moral complexity." He provides a passage from the book that gives an idea of those "linguistic riches." I think that he ought to have been given more room in which to discuss the book, partly because he is sympathetic to it but also because a longer review would give us a better idea of his prejudices and how he handles them. We can only infer this from his dislike of Laura Esquivel's Malinche (translated by Ernesto Mestre-Reed).

Occasional flashes of poetry flicker over the mountains of abstract speculation and historical caricature; indeed, long passes of Malinche read like chunks lifted from an encyclopedia. In a typically awkward passage, Esquivel explains that her heroine "soon found that whoever controls information, whoever controls meaning, acquires power. And she discovered that, when she translated, she controlled the situation, and not only that but that words could be weapons. The finest of weapons."

This at least teaches me that my idea of "awkward" is different from Mr Parini's.

Sharing a page are Julia Scheeres's review of Don't I Know You?, by Karen Shepard, and Chelsea Cain's review of Telegraph Days, by Larry McMurtry. The first piece is generally favorable, but it consists of a botched (unintelligible) summary through which a sole ray of light is allowed to pierce:

But if Don't I Know You? fizzles as a murder mystery, it succeeds brilliantly - like Shepard's previous novels ... - as a deft study of the mechanics of compromise.

The second piece is unfavorable, but in a way that makes you wonder if Ms Cain might not be the wrong reviewer for Mr McMurtry's book. I gather that Telegraph Days isn't something of a lark, and that larks are too light for Ms Cain. She finds the heroine, Nellie Courtright, "just kind of annoying." This ought to have inspired the editors of the Book Review to seek a second opinion.

Nonfiction

Only nine nonfiction book reviews! Imagine my delight! Where to begin?

Why not with Harold Bloom's very bad review of Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity, by Rebecca Goldstein. Mr Bloom really ought not to be allowed to write reviews for the Book Review. I say that his review is very bad, but I have no idea whether it is favorable or unfavorable; Mr Bloom is too busy blustering about Spinoza and Jewishness to pause for judgment. One would not expected such a self-important blowhard to observe John Updike's rules for reviewing books, but it's clear that Mr Bloom doesn't have any rules of his own. "Read [Spinoza's] Ethics," Mr Bloom intones, "it will illuminate you, but through light with heat." Mr Bloom is all heat and no sense.

The tables are turned in Anthony Swofford's review of 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, by Daniel Pinchbeck. Mr Swofford quotes enough rope to hang Mr Pinchbeck.

His descriptions of his trips are New Age narcissistic and fortune-cookie cute. Apparently, when you are mindblown on iboga, the root teacher speaks in CAPS. Among the messages Pinchbeck receives: "PRIMORDIAL WISDOM TEACHER OF HUMANITY." While on a "fungal sacrament," Pinchbeck describes the Nevada morning desert at Burning Man as "a Narnia sunrise of golden cloud fingers and taffeta swirls feather-spinning across the horizon." No thanks, dude, I'll pass on the fungal.

Mr Swofford does point out that, when he's writing about other things, such as the New York he grew up in or the degradation of Hopiland, Mr Pinchbeck's prose improves.

Sir Harold Evans's review of Public Editor #1: The Collected Columns (With Reflections, Reconsiderations, and Even a Few Retractions) of the First Ombudsman of The New York Times, by Daniel Okrent, seems to be favorable, but for the most part it is a somewhat intramural discussion of the ways a newspaper can put its high standards at risk. Then again, I can't imagine that anyone but a news junkie, a Timesophobe or a professional journalist is going to be much interested in this book.

Suzy Hansen provides an example of the reviewer who wants to be sympathetic but cannot, and who observes Mr Updike's fifth rule by holding up a book with the same general subject-matter that she really likes. That book is Alexandra Fuller's Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, a memoir of growing up in Rhodesia. Casting With a Fragile Thread: A Story of Sisters and Africa, by Wendy Kann, is not, in Ms Hansen's opinion, nearly as good a book.

[H]er descriptions are methodical rather than illuminating. Her humorlessness does hint at the empty smugness of colonial life, the grim paradox of white people engaged in a fundamentally adventurous and privileged enterprise and clinging desperately to what are ultimately small and airless lives. Yet she remains oddly distant, even interested, in the deadening ugliness of oppression.

Neil Genzlinger, sharing the same page, faults Ted Steinberg's American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn for indulging in too many generalizations and too much "lazy sociology." In the end, he finds that Mr Steinberg has not written the book that he set out to write, but settled for something much less, with a fantastic chapter on lawn mowers.

There is something more complex going on in America's lawn-care psyche that Steinberg, who teaches at Case Western Reserve University, addresses. Plenty of lawn-obsessed people read the paper, have college degrees, support the Nature Conservancy; they cannot possibly think the chemicals they dump on their grass are good for their children or their wildlife or their groundwater, yet they dump them anyway. If you're one of those people, you'll get lots of interesting history and amusing anecdotes in American Green, but you won't get an explanation for your own self-contradictory behavior.

As a movie critic, A O Scott inclines naturally toward summarization, but he resists it in his review of Donald Antrim's The Afterlife, a memoir of the author's dysfunctional family, particularly his mercurial mom. Mr Scott retails plenty of anecdotes, but he uses them to highlight the "how" of Mr Antrim's book, which involves "tactical démarche the domestic unbearable to the homely absurd" that "succeeds beautifully."

In an equally sympathetic, but not quite as good, review, Adam Hochschild praises John McPhee's Uncommon Carriers, a collection of pieces about the craft of shipping freight. Mr McPhee is scrupulously apolitical in his descriptions of coal trains and diesel trucks; "his concern here is to shed light on some of the infrastructure jobs we take for granted." Mr Hochschild summarizes extensively and does not quote at length - a bad decision, given Mr McPhee's controversial reputation as a stylist of tendencies toward the infinite. How much information is too much information? Mr Hochschild does not address the soporific powers of Mr McPhee's expansiveness; he does not provide a correlative to the paragraph from Robert Stone's review, cited above, that would address an aspect of the author's work that is bound to be contentious. And the review is very sentimental about the vanishing world that Uncommon Carriers covers.

Jonathan Mahler's review of Just Americans: How Japanese Americans Won a War at Home and Abroad: The Story of the 100th Battalion/442d Regimental Combat Team in World War II, by Robert Asahina, calls the book "timely, thoughtful and meticulously researched, if at times plodding." He enlarges on this thesis with summarizes and further judgments, padded by remarks on the internment of Japanese Americans living along the Pacific Coast. In short, he wanders far from the Battle of the Bulge action that is the focus of Mr Asahina's book.

What can one say of Sex Collectors: The Secret World of Consumers, Connoisseurs, Curators, Creators, Dealers, Bibliographers, and Accumulators of "Erotica," by Geoff Nicholson? Emily Nussbaum is concise: "It's perhaps unkind, but also true, that I found myself thinking wistfully that I'd prefer to have talked to Nicholson about his book at a dinner party than to have actually read it." That's not Mr Nicholson's fault, really, as the rest of Ms Nussbaum's review makes clear.

[Mr Nicholson is] such an appealing writer that you want him to succeed. Sadly, Nicholson's chosen territory turns out to be surprisingly unsexy.

The act of collecting is objectively boring; the acquisition of a rarity will be of interest to the acquirer (and to the bested competition), but to no one else. And what could be sadder than sex made boring? The naughty attitude that will be required to make Sex Collectors a fun read is not included.

Sean Wilsey's review of Fun Home: A Family Tragicomedy, by Alison Bechdel, makes the difficult case for the truly literary graphic (nonfiction) novel. Noting that the novel sent him to the dictionary five times, he makes it clear that Ms Bechdel's writing is not merely decorated with sesquipedalians. There is an example of the author's graphic style, too. Ms Bechdel has apparently been running an indie comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For, for years; her new book addresses her father's closeted homosexuality, and the possibility that she brought his life to an end by the letter in which she came out as a lesbian to her parents. Mr Wilsey remarks on the increasing demand that memoirists act as responsible documentarians as well, and cautions against it:

Of course the true memoirist's mission, like the novelist's, is not so much establishing factuality as getting to the heart and truth of something - and there's no way to get there dishonestly. Having read Fun Home I believe that Bechdel's made the journey. But my certainty is blessedly un-fact-checkable.

(Just to clarify: the title alludes to the Bechdel family's mordant term for the mortuary business that they ran.)

Lee Siegel's Essay, "Paul Zweig's Journeys Into the Self" means to praise a "fierce man who searched for the undiscoverable place where words and experiences are one," but as an introduction to the poet, who died in 1984, the piece serves Zweig ill. It would have been wiser of Mr Siegel to provide generous samples of Zweig's writing. Written about, instead, Zweig sounds utterly impossible.

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At the Tennis House in Prospect Park, Brooklyn

Kathleen and I attended a memorial service for the mother of a dear friend yesterday, and because getting up early, getting dressed up, and going to church were involved, I find it hard to believe that today is not Monday. Because I spent Friday in Brooklyn with Ms NOLA, walking until my quads were screaming with pain (I desperately needed a wheelchair - and got one, in the form of the Q train), I'm a little bit behind, and have only just begin to read the Book Review. Fear not; I'll have something here by the end of the day. (This week's issue reeks of "important!")

I hadn't set foot in Prospect Park in twenty-six years. What was my problem?

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Wow. I've just read A O Scott's review of The Lake House, and, - wow! - it's quite positive! I expected The New York Times to figure out some way of trashing the movie, which indeed would  be "deeply silly" and "completely preposterous" if it weren't for the stars, Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves, reunited for the first time since Speed - another improbable movie that they made irresistible.

"Hijacking a bus? Are they crazy?" As it happened, I saw Speed in a large, boisterous theatre the day after OJ's wild ride. The audience could not possibly have been more into the movie.

Ms Bullock and Mr Reeves made hijacking a bus work, and, in The Lake House, they make epistolary time travel work as well. I trust that no one will waste any effort on Primer-style "timelines": this is simply not a movie to be figured out. Or, at the risk of being a little brutal, let me say that it's a movie that only somebody on the autistic side would feel the need to analyze. The Lake House reminds us of what it means to be a real film star. Real film stars can move mountains - and they can also communicate across timelines. And they can make you forget your objections to the "thesis." Completely. They can make you want to bury them, in a Viking funeral!

The "thesis" of The Lake House is that Dr Kate Forster, who has just moved out of the eponymous villa at the beginning of the film - and it is a villa - engages in a correspondence with Alex Wyler, whom she believes to be her successor tenant but who in fact arranged for her to rent the place two years earlier. Kate lives in 2006; Alex in 2004, but they can fall in love anyway, through the power of well-written letters - a hat is duly tipped to Miss Austen - and in the end the film is wonderfully clever, if not very convincing, about resolving the tension between impossibility and romance. Alex is the son of the architect who built the house, "with his own hands" (unlikely, knowing Christopher Plummer). He is also, as the half of the romance who lives in the past, capable of learning about Kate from her letters. The scene in which he contrives to meet her, knowing that she is the love of his life but unwilling to shock her with the incredible manner in which he has gotten to know her - and his decency, here, is really aimed at us - is one of the loveliest romantic moments that I know of. Kate and Alex are dancing, and you can see at the same time that, while she's falling for him because he's so manifestly in love with her, he's also holding back big time. It's an astonishing scene, and, despite the fact that every trope of Love Affair-type romance has been utilized, if not exploited, by The Lake House, the scene is also absolutely new. I can't believe I'm saying this, but, in his beautifully registered restraint, Keanu Reeves is at least momentarily the equal of Cary Grant.

Perhaps the success of The Lake House owes to the fact that, even in today's Hollywood, its principals are very unusual actors. Mr Reeves has obviously worked hard and not without success to develop his interpretive breadth. In two recent films, The Gift and Thumbsucker, he explored his dark side, and also his capacity to look malignant and unattractive, without losing his strength as an opener. (I know; I'm speaking prematurely.) His Alex Wyler is a rougher-edged lover than any he has played in the past; Mr Reeves displays a lot of ambiguous good-old-boy toothy smiles in The Lake House, and as the son of a brilliant architect who has himself pursued upscale contracting simply in order to build things he is utterly convincing. As for Ms Bullock, she has a peculiar knack, one that I'm not sure that any actress has displayed in the past. Again and again, in movie after movie - don't we ever learn? - she convinces us that her characters have absolutely no idea how beautiful they are, that it's entirely reasonable that they don't try to trade on their good looks; and, at the same time, she carries herself with the dignity of a woman who knows that she deserves the best, or at any rate is someone who won't settle for less. There is a beguilingly honorable modesty in her performances that will excite anyone who has ever thrilled to the story of Cinderella (in any of its versions). Sometimes, what these actors have to bring to a given movie is wasted. But I'm with Mr Scott: The Lake House is a success.

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During the winter, I saw something in a Levenger catalogue - home of writing porn - that looked too good to be true. It was a library management tool that combined software with a barcode scanner to enable one to compile a library database by doing little more that a bit of barcode scanning. Once possessed of a UPC (universal product code), the software would browse various Internet databases in search of a match, and then download all the information into a table. I held off, dubious. By the time I gave in - there's no way I'm going to catalogue my library without some form of automation - the item had disappeared. Levenger no longer sold a product that had been designed for its label. Too good to be true, indeed.

Whatever Levenger's problems might have been, however, I found that several firms have developed this kind of package. Rather, Kathleen found them. (Kathleen loves to search the Internet.) She sent me half a dozen links and, after nowhere near the appropriate amount of deliberation, I settled on Readerware (despite the look and feel the Web site). It seemed to be the only product that came with a scanner.

The package arrived early this week. I didn't have time to get started with it until Wednesday. I can't say that setup was easy or that getting to know the product was a breeze, but I can't blame Readerware, either; confronted with unfamiliar materials, my brain loses half its IQ in a low-grade panic, and never fails to leap before it looks. It took forever to master the art of swiping the scanner, but eventually I learned that a light touch is the right touch.

Here's how it works: Having created a database file, you click on "Auto Catalog" and choose from a list of sites to search, such as Amazon and Tower Records. Then you proceed to swipe. When the computer recognizes a valid UPC, the software makes a satisfying little pop, and you move on the next entry. I found that working in batches of about thirty DVDs at a time was optimal. When you're through scanning for the time being, you click on a few "Next" buttons and let the browsing begin.

The browsing takes a while, anywhere from fifteen seconds to just over a minute per title. When all the information has been captured, a few more "Nexts" take you to a table of the new entries. This is the time to specify a location. The location field default's position is far to the right of the table, but I had no trouble re-positioning it directly beside the Title field. After all, reason number one for consulting the database is to find out where the hell things are.

The Sorice shelving in the hallway can accommodate about 120 standard DVD cases. I have about five times that many DVDs. When a new DVD enters the collection, either it goes straight into an album from Staples (each album holds 96 discs; the paper jackets and any internal stuff go into a box; the jewel cases get the heave-ho) or it takes the place of a shelved DVD that has just lost a popularity contest. The albums, of which there are four so far, divide the film universe as follows:

I Default: videos that don't belong in one of the other albums.

II Films by Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, James Ivory, and Woody Allen.

III Series (The Pallisers, Inspector Morse).

IV Black-and-white movies made before 1960.

Readerware makes it a snap for me to locate Murder My Sweet (for example) at [Album] IV [Page] 7 [Pocket] A. (It also makes reorganizing the albums from time to time unnecessary.)

I began with DVDs partly because they make up the smallest of my three libraries and partly because they're all the same size. It took less than twenty-four hours to commit every DVD in the house to the computer's memory.

Next up: non-classical CDs.

I am in a daze. Building the database felt like major-league fooling around.

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Yesterday was Flag Day, not that you'd know it in Manhattan, and so it's time to remind readers of Anne Lamott's call for a "green revolution" on Bastille Day, a month from now. It's very simple: wear something green and get out into the crowds. Greet anyone who appears to be doing the same thing. I'm going to hang out at the Metropolitan Museum that Friday afternoon. Up on the roof, if it's nice. 

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In the issue of October 15, 1966, The New Yorker published a story by Edith Templeton, "Talking of Count Sternborn." I was eighteen and in my freshman year at Notre Dame. I was very taken by Ms Templeton's sly tone, and I found her use of Tacitus's deadpan equivocations - not equivocations at all - very clever. I had never read any Tacitus - avoiding Latin class was one of my proudest achievements, although teaching myself the language was not proving a success - but I remembered what the narrator of the story had to say about him.

As I listened to the cook, I thought that if Tacitus had written my mother's history he would have stated, "It has been said that during the month of June of that year she journeyed to Switzerland, be it because she wanted to savor the beauty of that country, or be it because she wanted to display her fashionable clothes." I was twelve years old that summer in the nineteen-twenties, and I did not care for history, but I was greatly taken with Tacitus - the nobility of his bitterness, his uncomfortable lucidity about people's behavior, and his shattering, wooden-faced irony. I had memorized such passages as "While a great fire devastated the town of Cremona, the temple of Diana was spared, be it because the Goddess protected her shrine, or be it because it was situated on the outskirts of the town."

I believe that this story appears in the long out-of-print collection, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, but I'm not sure. I've tried to get hold of it from time to time, just for the pleasure of re-reading the story, the title of which, of course, I forgot. All I remembered was a Bohemian castle, a little girl, and Tacitus. Yesterday, I also remembered (d'oh) that the story must be available in The Complete New Yorker, and of course it is.

Thanks to Google, I was able to track down that temple in, or just outside of, Cremona. Here's Tacitus (Historiarum, III, xxxiii):

Per quadriduum Cremona suffecit. Cum munis sacra profanaque in ignem considerent, solum Mefitis templus stetit ante moenis, loco seu numine defensum.

It's so marvelously different in Latin. Tacitus needs only four words what it takes twenty to say in English. That's the fun of translating top-drawer Latin, and also the reason why translations quickly date, as fashions dictate different ways of unpacking the lapidary compression.

It's interesting, don't you think, that Ms Templeton, in real life a dedicated votary of the goddess of love, misremembered Tacitus. Notes inform me that Mefitis is the goddess of malaria "whose ravages in the valley of the Po must have been serious in antiquity." (Loeb Classics, Nº 111)

Count Sternborn is a neighbor of the narrator's family who has been unlucky in love, and as the story goes along little Edith is told numerous stories about him by various elderly people. The wickedest story, characteristically - Edith Templeton would write about her family throughout her career - is told to her by her grandmother, a grande dame who's full of surprises, and so carefully does