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The month of August, which was so productive in ways that I wasn't anticipating, and so unproductive in the ones that I was, comes to an end with a picture of me. I'm standing on Horseshoe Beach in Bermuda, five or six years ago. I still have the hat, and I wore the shirt the other day (it's time to put away the Madras - wouldn't want to run into Serial Mom). As for the smile, it's clear that I'm not upset about a refrigerator in the foyer.
Vivement la rentrée!
Guess who forgot all about his must-have but seldom used swinging kitchen door (just like home!) when replacing a dodgy refrigerator? I'm in luck: the man who built the door can come tomorrow to take it down. For the time being, however, I have a new refrigerator in the foyer and a (still) working refrigerator in the kitchen. I'm covered.
You know what? I don't care. The refrigerator in the foyer will eventually drive me crazy, but it's not driving me crazy yet. I get a little more time to think about how it's going to be stocked once it's plugged in in the kitchen. I envision something very bachelor: Champagne and Corona, some condiments, eggs and cheeses. Yoghurt for Kathleen. A chunk of salami for sandwiches, and don't forget the wieners. Maybe that's not sounding "bachelor" anymore, but the point is that the refrigerator in a Yorkville kitchen should not be stocked for remote contingencies. If something comes up - an out-of-town friend pops up at the last minute - then either I throw together something entirely fresh or we go out.
Got it?
Bob Staake's adorable cover for the current New Yorker, "Back to Cool," got me thinking about phrenology, the "science" of determining character from bumps on the skull. Given what was known about neuroscience in 1800, when Franz Josef Gall's protoscientific work took off - next to nothing was known about neuroscience in 1800 - I wondered about just how given protuberances (or the lack thereof) were associated with particular traits and skills. I haven't been able to find an answer, but I do know that actual brains were never examined. One of Gall's theories was that the skull takes it shape from the brain that it houses (an idea that strikes me for some reason as perfectly backwards). His empirical findings were necessarily limited to taking certain measurements and assessing the characters of his first subjects. The rest was extrapolation and generalization, not research.
And yet Gall and his followers were so convincing that, by the middle of the nineteenth century, some employers demanded phrenological examinations in the way that they might demand background checks today. How perfectly ridiculous - given what we know now. And that's my point. What we know now, besides knowing that phrenology is not useful for assessing character and fitness, and besides knowing about axons and ganglia and SSRIs, is that we have a lot still to learn about brains. We have a lot to learn, and it's going to be painstaking work, not least because of the ethical issues involved in studying living brains - which of course belong to living human beings.
Within the space of two centuries, homo sapiens has gone from being a vulnerable creature to becoming a potential destroyer of life on Earth. That's not nearly enough time for the species' brain to evolve adaptive neurological structures. We're still wired to take what we can get while we can get it and hope for the best. We're learning that this is no longer a viable way to plan for our children's future, but you don't stop multi-millennial thought patterns in two hundred years. Thinking about the folly of phrenology this morning, I wonder if something exactly inverse is happening to the claims that we're willing to make about the extent of our knowledge. While acknowledging our mushrooming capacity to do harm, we admit that there is much to be learned about doing good. And we'll learn it: we won't make it up, as Dr Gall made up phrenology. We won't respond to the unknown with fine-sounding speculative plausibilities and then applaud our cleverness.
If nothing else, phrenology has served cartoonists well since its heyday. Its division of the head into "organs," each of which is associated with a mental propensity, can be readily hijacked for lampooning the private preoccupations that animate current fads. Mr Staake's bluff but confident middle-schooler is as up-to-the-minute as he could be.
Two days to go, and then it's back to original-entry blogging. I hope that you've enjoyed spending time at Portico, and that the layout of the site is more familiar. This blog is transient (not its comments, though), but Portico is permanent. Perhaps it would better to say that it's a permanent upgrade. Or so I like to think.
Showcased today is Alice McDermott's Child of My Heart one of the loveliest novels that I've ever read, a delicate but never cloying exploration of the liminal consciousness of a beautiful teenager whose childhood is about to end. There is sadness in the novel's East Hampton sunshine, but it is still radiant sunshine, too beautiful, too evocative of summer's freedom to be at all unpleasant.
In which we have a look at this week's New York Times Book Review, even though we're on vacation.
It was unusually difficult, this week, to find sentences that conveyed the gist of the reviews in which they appeared while also casting come light on the books themselves. Emily Barton's review of Reading Like a Writer propelled me to the nearest bookstore for a copy of Francine Prose's new book, and, having finished it, I can only wish that fiction reviewers would look to it for guidance. Ms Prose can talk about writing in great detail without giving too much story away. Too many reviews regurgitate contents without providing much of a sense of what spending book-length time with them might be like.
Fiction
¶ The Emperor's Children, by Claire Messud. "Among its many pleasures, this novel indisputably reminds us of one truth that cannot be declared fungible: the obdurate reality of the human imagination. The Emperor's Children is a penetrating testament to its power." - Meghan O'Rourke.
¶ The Yacoubian Building, by Alaa Al Aswany (translated by Humphrey Davies. "For the last quarter-century, Egypt has been ruled by Hosni Mubarak, a president who has won elections by imprisoning his opponents and has presided over a ramshackle economy riddled with corruption. From this depressing landscape, Alaa Al Aswany has conjured a bewitching political novel of contemporary Cairo that is also an engagé novel about power and a comic yet sympathetic novel about the vagaries of the human heart." - Lorraine Adams.
¶ All Aunt Hagar's Children, by Edward P Jones. "But there are no roughly sketched characters in Jones's stories. All are given the benefit of the doubt, and there is evidence that a better path is not out of reach for anyone. Even the most sympathetic characters, though, make decisions that are far too human to be doubted." - Dave Eggers.
¶ Brief Encounters With Che Guevara, by Ben Fountain. "Each of these eight stories is as rich as a novel - high praise when you consider how many of today's novels could be distilled into a short story." - Liesl Schillinger.
¶ Voyage Along the Horizon and Your Face Tomorrow: Volume Two: Dance and Dream, by Javier Marías (translated by Kristina Cordero and Margaret Jull Costa, respectively). "If Voyage Along the Horizon could have been written by almost anyone (at times, it seems to have been written by everyone)..." "The slow, indefinite revelation of his universe is the most affecting narrative feat in Marías's work to date. It has a musical lightness that recalls Charles Ives's Unanswered Question, a composition that rises but does not resolve." - Wyatt Mason.
¶ The Banquet Bug, by Geling Yan. About a dish called "Dragon in the Flame of Desire": "This prurient item might easily have been featured in The Banquet Bug, Genling Yan's sly comic novel about the excesses - culinary and otherwise - of modern life in the Chinese capital. Although it may seem fantastical, her fiction is rooted in fact." - Ligaya Mishan.
¶ The Driftless Area, by Tom Drury. "This fine, ambling novel ends with a tug of war between the spiritual we don't altogether trust and the grind we're somehow unable to resist." - Robert Draper.
Nonfiction
¶ Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for those Who Want to Write Them, by Francine Prose. "I became a writer because books gave me such joy. Her insistence on that pleasure informs her method: reading carefully to see what au author does on the page and between the lines. This casts learning in a positive light, unlike the typical workshops E R approach of trying to diagnose and cure the ailments of a story." - Emily Barton.
¶ The Reluctant Mr Darwin: An Intimate Portrait of Charles Darwin and the Making of His Theory of Evolution, by David Quammen. "Darwin's creativity in explaining how species vary forms the crux of the story here. Quammen's book is almost as creative, giving a very free translation of his secondary sources. ... Invitations were answered with [Darwin's] courteous refusals, and no cultural refraction can render these, as Quammen does, as 'Leave me the hell alone!'" - Adrian Desmond.
¶ When Sex Goes to School: Warring Views on Sex - and Sex Education - Since the Sixties, by Kristin Luker. "One way to get these conflicting world-views out into the open is to fight about marriage, which Luker thinks is the true subject of the sex-ed wars." - Judith Shulevitz.
¶ Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn, edited by Caroline Moorhead. "Beyond the illustriousness of her correspondents ... what makes this book a literary landmark is that Gellhorn's prose, splendid enough in her 13 published books of fiction, travel writing and reportage, is at its finest in the letter form." - Francine du Plessix Gray.
¶ The President's Counselor: The Rise to Power of Alberto Gonzales, by Bill Minutaglio. ""Minutaglio's fascinating book will surely not be the last word on this sorry tale, but it goes a long way toward removing the veil Gonalez has tried to drape over his career." - Jacob Heilbrun.
¶ Natural Selection: Gary Giddens on Comedy, Film, Music, and Books, by Gary Giddens. "He makes the case that popular culture, in all its minutiae, ultimately engages us with the world; immersing oneself in a book, song or film is the very opposite of escapist." - Ada Calhoun.
¶ Nonfiction Chronicle. - Tara McKelvey
¶ The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, by Francis S Collins. "In a country where a large percentage of the population believes that the world is less than 10,000 years old and that humans once frolicked with dinosaurs, his argument that science and faith are compatible deserves a wide hearing."
¶ In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line, by George Hutchinson. "IN Hutchinson's telling, Larsen doesn't seem at home in any society, black or white, even as a adult. That subtitle makes it sound as if this were a dry analysis of race and society. In fact, the book is about Larsen. The brings the issues to life."
¶ Path of Destruction: The Devastation of New Orleans and the Coming Age of Superstorms, by John McQuaid and Mark Schleifstein. "Somehow, the books lacks drama and texture. Although Schleifstein was on the scene, you'd never know it from the detached prose."
¶ A Pickpocket's Tale: The Underworld of Nineteenth-Century New York, by Timothy J Gilfoyle. "Despite a Dickensian childhood, institutional sadism and bad luck, [George Appo] remains honest, in his own way, and is rightly transformed into an American hero."
¶ Grayson, by Lynne Cox. "But given the platitudes ('Sometimes you just have to believe') and bland observations, this hardly seems worth a 5 AM swim in 55-degree water."
¶ Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong, by Marc D Hause. "The vast bulk of Moral Minds consists of reports of experimental results,, but Hauser does very little to make clear how these results bear on his claim that there is a 'moral voice of our species'." - Richard Rorty.
Rachel Donadio's Essay, "The Mystery of the Missing Novel," is a disturbing look into WW Norton's refusal to publish John Robert Lennon's Happyland, presumably for fear of offending American Girl creator Pleasant Rowland.
This review was written on 3 September 2006 and backdated; see below for scanty details about the refrigerator crisis that distracted me.
Good grief! Our refrigerator died in the night. We awoke to a groaning motor and a thawed freezer. It appears that my much-postponed icebox cleanup has been taken care of! The official repair people told me that they can't come until next week, prompting me to ask if I now live in a third-world country.
Something even more depressing: Ronald Reagan. Not so much Ronald Reagan himself - a charming opportunist with no particular agenda beyond preferring owners to workers - as the fact that a majority of Americans thought that he ought to be their country's president. This is still the most stupefying thing that has happened to me in my lifetime. His victory was the moment in which I asked myself, "But where can I go to, to be free? Where's my new world?"
The mirror that Ronald Reagan's election holds up to the nation that chose him, of all people, to lead it discloses a terrible disgrace.
The disadvantages of being a one-man band don't need to be spelled out. I can simply offer the following extract, which I have removed from today's page without even trying to fix it.
Reagan's actual cabinet and staff acted its part as well, that would ordain seemed to believe that authority was not vested in himself. But to his aides he was the President, scrupulously respecting him as the leader of the free world.
"Would ordain seemed to believe" is the most appalling pile-up of verbs that I've ever let stand (I hope).
Kathleen went to bed, but didn't go to sleep. I asked if I could help by reading her something. Reading Kathleen something always puts her to sleep. This would seem to be a comment on how boring I am if we did not remember how deeply we wish that our parents would put us to sleep with the stories that we ask them to read. Their assurance that everything is okay lets us drop into the semiconsciousness of slumber. Reading "fundamentally" - opening the book to whatever and going from there - from the Letters of Lord Chesterfield, a book that I keep on a certain pile of books, turned out to be almost perfect.
It was almost perfect because it almost put Kathleen to sleep. Unfortunately, it woke me up. Having been "fundamental," I came across the most amazing bit of worldly wisdom. Mind you, Philip Stanhope was writing to his bastard son a century after the events under discussion:
Richelieu (by the way) is so strong a proof of the inconsistency of human nature, that I cannot help observing to you, that while he absolutely governed both his King and his country, and was, in a great degree, the arbiter of the fate of the fate of all Europe, he was more jealous of the great reputation of Corneille than of the power of Spain; and more flattered with being thought (what he was not) the best poet, than with being thought (what he certainly was) the greatest statesman in Europe; and affairs stood still while he was concerting the criticism upon the Cid.
It's difficult, reading this, to disagree with Mrs Lintott (Dorothy, I'd swear her prénom was, the Frances de la Tour character in The History Boys), when she denounces history itself as the record of male incompetence. It is also difficult not to feel really stupid about not reading Lord Chesterfield morning. noon, and night.
It's incredibly conceited of me to say so, but rereading today's page made me laugh out loud. I don't know that it will tickle the funnybone of anyone who hasn't seen Rex Harrison in Unfaithfully Yours, but I hope that it will persuade a few film buffs to see the film if they haven't, and to watch it again if they have.
I saw Rex Harrison twice onstage. The first time, he was still playing Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady, a part that I've always felt that his performance in Unfaithfully Yours gave him a lock on. The second time was in 1985, in a Broadway revival of Frederick Lonsdale's 1923 comedy, Aren't We All? I don't remember anything about the play, except that nobody said "Tennis, anyone?", but the cast was glittering, with Claudette Colbert, Lynn Redgrave, and Jeremy Brett. It was pointed out that Claudette Colbert, who lived to be ninety-two, had launched her career by the time the play was introduced! And I have never seen a better demonstration of "The show must go on." Jeremy Brett's wife, the Mystery series producer Joan Wilson, had died the night before, or the night before that.
What sounds more old-fashioned than "aspic"? I'll bet that lots of people have never tasted one. But I assure you that there is nothing more refreshing than the julienned beet aspic toward which this entry is pointed. Like all cold dishes, it's made well in advance, so that preparation of the dish is completely uncoupled from the inevitable fuss of entertaining.
We have a good friend who won't eat beets. To her, they taste like dirt. I was astounded when I heard this, but over time I've come to see what she means - and I also see why certain remote and disadvantaged people eat dirt. (Or so they say.) Beets are undeniably earthy. But what this means is not that they taste vague and indistinct, but rather sharp and even a bit metallic. That's what makes them so refreshing. Like lemons, they announce themselves with vigor and a total lack of ambiguity.
¶ Last night, to get to Lincoln Center, I boarded a crosstown bus that, when I walked out of the building, was standing in front of our driveway, waiting for the light to change. Walking vigorously, I caught up with it on the other side of Second Avenue - sometimes it's a blessing that buses take forever to board. I don't know when the girl in the green top got on the bus, but she got off just ahead of me at Broadway.
She wasn't a girl really. In her mid-thirties. An independent person, I should say, if only because she was out by herself on a Saturday night. Neither tall nor short, large nor small, plain nor beautiful, she was just a girl in a bright green top, a grey skirt, and - I think - deep red pumps. I took in this information when I followed her out of the 66th Street station. So, we're both going to Mostly Mozart, I thought. Not that I saw her go into Avery Fisher Hall. I was too busy promenading the Josie Robertson Plaza - isn't that what it's improbably called? - making phone calls. It was, after all, only 7:30. I forgot all about the girl in the green top.
Until she was the first person in the seats behind the Mostly Mozart Orchestra to stand up and applaud when the performance of the Jupiter Symphony was over. When two Manhattanites who know each other run into each other, they're quick to say that New York is a small town. This was different: this was something that proved how very much New York is not a small town. This was holding on, for more than two seconds, to one of the hundreds - sometimes thousands - of total strangers that one encounters in the course of doing almost anything exterior in Manhattan.
From the protracted preamble to the chapter entitled "Deliverance," on page 311 of Special Topics in Calamity Physics:
Without the disturbing incident of this chapter, I'd never have taken on the task of writing this story. I'd have nothing to write. Life in Stockton would have continued exactly as it was, as placid and primly self-contained as Switzerland, and any strange incidents - [catalogue deleted] - might be regarded as unusual, certainly, but in the end, nothing that couldn't be dully reviewed and accounted for by Hindsight, forever unsurprised and shortsighted. [Emphasis added]
So self-indulgent is this young author that she doesn't even recognize the very bad review that she has just given to the bloated nothing that she has scribbled on three hundred bound pages.
The success of Marisha Pessl's debut can only be ascribed to a triumph of publicity. Negative commentary has been muted; the gatekeepers, while not entirely comfortable with the book, have plumped for encouraging it. I haven't spoken with any ordinary mortals who've actually read it, so I don't know just how exceptional my dislike might have been. But I know that I am poised at the much-talked-of moment when, as Janet Maslin put it, the author dumps her "booster rockets" and the story takes off. We'll see. Even if it turns into the best yarn ever, that would not excuse the Stage IV cancer of what I've already had to put up with.
Well, I still haven't been to Italy, haven't seen any of Palladio's villas. Nor have I written to Witold Rybczynsk, probably because I never quite finished his book about Palladio. It has been a while, indeed, since I've picked up The Four Books on Architecture, although it's very handily situated in our living room. Indeed, re-reading this page, I felt the anxiety that I've been suffering for weeks focus into a stab of pain. The month hasn't gone at all as planned. Never have I been more "social," and in few months have I ever been to so many plays and concerts. Long lunches, lengthy rambles and evenings out have left me feeling rather dissipated, and more than a little dizzy. I have christened this strange mood "Hellomoto," after the antic ringtone of that name that comes with my Razr phone. Perhaps an hour or two with Palladio would act, as I wrote, as a "tonic" to "restore jaded senses."
But of course I can't, not right now. I'm determined to finish another task. See the following entry, above.
(Thanks to Joe.My.God.)
It occurs to me that I haven't been reading at my usual rate. It's true that I've been busy, but it's also true that I'm mired in the middle - or not quite the middle - of Marisha Pessl's Special Topics in Calamity Physics. As of page 180, from which I am going to quote, Special Topics is a wildly overwritten but deadeningly mediocre imitation of Donna Tartt's superb The Secret History.
He cleared his throat, stuck his hands in his pocket with ox-in-sun slowness. I suspected Jade had recently tipped him off to my feelings - "Gag's gaga over you," I could hear her saying, "like so gone, like fixated," - because lately, when he looked at me, a shabby smile drifted across his face. His eyes circled over me like old flies. I suffered no hope, no daydream that he felt anything similar to the way I did, which wasn't lust or love ("Juliet and Romeo be damned, you can't be in love until you've flossed your teeth next to the person at least three hundred times," Dad said) but acute electricity. I'd spot him lumbering across the Commons; I'd feel struck by lightning. I'd see him in the Scratch at he'd say, "Howdy, Retch"; instantly I was a light bulb in a series circuit. I wouldn't have been surprised if, in Elton, when he trudged by my AP Art History class on his way to the infirmary (he was always on the verge of measles or mumps), my hair rose off my neck and stood on end.
Lets hope it's not, ahem, the mumps! The last sentence is particularly unfortunate, couched as it is in the conditional mode. Serious metaphoric overreach! It should read: "Whenever he passed by me my hair stood on end," or something similarly simple. We don't need AP Art History (please!) or trips to the infirmary for childhood diseases (excuse me?) to get the picture. But I'm not sure that Blue van Meer, the precious narrator of Special Topics, gets the picture. She's lost in Lingoland, where on every desk there stand at least three "Power Vocabulary" calendars.
Or, as Darren Reidy says in the Village Voice - how I wish I'd said it - "Her métier is claptrap..."
A few years ago (all right, six), British novelist John Lanchester came out with a book called Mr Phillips. Long before I'd reached the halfway point of this story about a man who has lost his job but can't 'fess up to his wife, I noticed that the title character was chock-full of aphorisms that, alas, had hardly been of any use to him. It' still an interesting collection, these insights of a failure. And how cheeky of me to substitute this list for a decent review!
All right: here's why I had a big day on Tuesday. (Did I spend a minute on the Book Review? I don't think so.) Last Thursday, a parental figure by the name of Z - she is only a few years older than I am (two? three?), but she rocks - asked her daughter about my adoption search. That would be my plan to make contact with my birth mother, should she be interested, just to let her know that I'm okay. Until reading The Girls Who Went Away a few months ago, I had no intention whatever of learning more about my birth parents, but Ann Kessler's book changed my mind about that within the space of three chapters.
Here's what happened: Z wrote to her daughter, "How RJ's search for his mother going?" This was passed on to me in a very neutral way, but I understood, as if at the wrong end of a stun gun, that Impatience was being Registered.
I'll spare you the part about how I had to have birth certificates or whatever before I could proceed. It was all nonsense, but I didn't know how much it was nonsense until I finally had what I thought I "needed to have" before beginning the search. I didn't. On Tuesday I got the documents from the safe-deposit box. On Wednesday, there was a Joan-of-Arc moment in the blue room, where I write. I didn't see any angels, but I certainly heard the voice of Z. "Well, honey, it's nice that you've got your papers now. What's next?" It was a voice that, without being insistent, laid down an ultimatum. What it really said was, "If you think that you can give yourself the kind of credit for getting those papers yesterday that will allow you to do nothing for a few days until the middle of next week, you, mister, are full of shit!" Not that Z would ever put it that way. But it was the message.
I dropped what I was doing (writing to Z's daughter about my day) and Googled the Foundling Hospital, the organization that placed me with my adoptive parents way back in 1948. It took a bit of determination - they can't be actually happy about answering the requests of people like me - but I did find, finally, a contact whom I could call about my records. Ms Josephine Wintz was pleasantly straightforward about the form that she was going to send me, which I would fill out and have notarized - pretty much what I expected to be the next step, and a sensible step it is, too. She asked for the name of my adoptive parents, and a few other details. Conceivably, there could be a "no records" screw-up, but I don't expect that.
Everyone in my circle says, Bravo, RJ! You're so courageous! But bravery has nothing to do with it. I want my mom* to know that I'm okay - that's all. I'm not planning to find meaning in a new family. That may well be what happens, but my objective is simply to assure a woman who took from 6 January until 15 March 1948 to sign surrender papers that, wow, I'm still here. A middle-aged creakopotamus, but still good for a few lines. She will, if the anecdotal information is correct, be 77. Not so old these days. At 58 I feel a lot older. But as Christine Lavin sings, I was once somebody's baby, and if she is worried about me, this mother of mine, then I must do what I can to still her anxieties.
(And then, sound Irishwoman that she probably is, she'll find out that I'm resolute about the need for gay marriage, and have a fatal heart attack.)
My good friend Susan was here for lunch. "But of course it's got to be disturbing. You were part of a project, short on experience but long on agenda, that hardly knew what it was doing, something like the Tuskegee Syphilis Study." Oh, not nearly that bad. But perhaps that irresponsible.
* And this is far from the least interesting detail. I called my adoptive mother "Mother" from about the age of eleven on. I couldn't call her "Mom." In this I was partially echoing my adoptive father, who called his mother "Mother" until the day she died. But the woman who gave me birth seems like Mom to me.
The burnish deepens with time. A year from now, this will be the souvenir of a beautifully polished chamber concert that I attended last Sunday, something that will perhaps make readers feel a stab of regret for having unaccountably seen fit to do something else.
"Joshua Bell and Friends" - that's what the Mostly Mozart mailer said. And it was correct, as long as you understand that Mozart and Mendelssohn are posthumously numbered among the friends. Along with composer/bassist Edgar Meyer, who unlike the other names in the program was able to stand up for a bit of applause.
Performers are always saying that X - the work that they're about to play - is one of their favorite compositions. They mean it, at least at the time. But when Joshua Bell sang atop seven colleagues in Mendelssohn's Octet, I knew that he has loved this music for a long time. He would play it more often if it were easier to conjoin two string quartets.*
The program was very simple. A Mozart piano quartet (there are two; tonight's was the first, in g, K 478), then a work commissioned for Joshua Bell and written by his choice of composer, Edgar Meyer. After an intermission, the Octet. The Mozart, which I thought I knew very well until this evening's performance, was played by Mr Bell with violist John Largess and cellist Edward Arron, forming a piano trio that played as such against Frederick Chiu's piano. I've been listening to this work for more than forty years, but until this evening it was a chamber piece for four players. Tonight, I heard it as a piece for two groups.
I'm not going to say anything about Concert Piece for Violin until I've heard it again - except that the second of the four movements made me think of hummingbirds. That's how fast Mr Bell was playing, and how softly and easily. Mr Meyer seems to have digested Debussy, Ravel, and other French masters.
Mendelssohn's Octet is the most astonishing example of precociousness that the West has to offer. Nobody, but nobody, has ever produced its aesthetic equal at the age of sixteen - certainly not Mozart, by the way. The opening Allegro moderato, ma con fuoco begins in hushed syncopation that almost at once leaps with irrepressible glee. There is a gravely sweet second subject - as grave as a teenager could be, that is - but the opening theme keeps pushing it aside, like boys on their way to a playground. The exposition closes in a glorious cadence, and if the players are worth their salt, you get to hear the entire thing over again. The development, similarly, concludes with a pile-up of syncopations that jumps into a thrilling unison. As for the movement's finish, there is nothing to compare with its youthful exaltation. This is the uncomplicated joy of being young and (musically speaking) hot.
Mr Bell and his colleagues played the three remaining movements with undiminished élan. The Andante was a coffer of burnished sonorities, its pausing chords impossibly melted into the sense of a single note. The Scherzo, whose only semblable is the Midsummer Night's Dream arabesque that Mendelssohn wrote a year or so later, and it skittered to its finish before it seemed to have introduced itself. The Presto went out with a great roar. And then the best thing happened: the audience, especially the kids in the cheap seats, burst into applause with something like the satisfying violence of an enormous exploding water balloon. Avery Fisher Hall was flooded with delight.
* As it happens, I have actually copied out the entire first movement of the Octet. I had access to the parts (who knows how) and I spent hours copying them into a spiral notebook that, oops, was open to the last page when I began my work, not the first. I ought to run a poll. Since I now have a lovely Eulenberg miniature of the score, I really don't need my laborious backward copy. D'you think I ought to throw it out? Or ought I to keep it, as a precious labor of love - even if I never look at it again. Too bad I don't have an adoring relation to do this for me.
In October 2001, I thought about "9/11" as a date in history books of the future, as a mark on a timeline. As we approach the fifth anniversary of the catastrophe, the date itself is as weighty and imposing as the towers that fell. It is still much too soon to assess its significance, but I think that we note a certain change in how we live. "9/11" blasted a hole in the bubble that Americans like to pull over themselves, blocking out consciousness of the rest of the world except - and this only for a minority - as a tourist destination. I am sure that most of my countrymen would like very much to seal themselves up again, only now they know that it's impossible.
For most of the people who have come to this country, the United States was not only a land of opportunity but an escape from conditions of greater or lesser oppression. Along with the other Western democracies, the United States has (until recently) inspired the growth of democracy everywhere. We need to stop looking at the rest of the world as the place from which our ancestors escaped.
In which we have a look at this week's New York Times Book Review, even though we're on vacation.
A fizzy issue this week, higher on buzz than lit-ra-ture. John Wranovics's review of Short Dog spends far too much time talking about the author's father's career. The book about Tiptree/Sheldon (on the cover, of course!) seems to be of interest because a woman posed as a male writer. Maybe there are too many books in my pile at the moment, but the idea of reading almost anything covered in this week's Review is insupportable wearying.
Fiction & Poetry
¶ Perennial Fall, by Maggie Dietz. "Dietz's lippy candor is invigorating in a wish-I'd-thought-of-that way, and it's a pleasure to be led through her world as she looks at familiar objects with fresh eyes." - David Kirby.
¶ The Brambles, by Eliza Minot. "If Minot had less command over her prose, this might have been fatal. As it is, however, she delivers such consistently perceptive, even stunning sentences that it's easy to overlook the less than cohesive story and just recline inside the characters' minds and listen to them think. This novel is imperfect in a way that leaves you marveling at the many things it does right and looking forward to the artist's next move." - Meghan Daum.
¶ The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas (translated by Richard Pevear). "No novelist since Dumas has been more irreverent of the conventions of well-made fiction or any more determined to tell stories without identifiable centers. There is, finally, something moving about his helpless, logorheic outpourings of narrative." - Terrence Rafferty.
¶ Soul Kitchen, by Poppy Z Brite. "But Brite's gritty affection for her kitchen hands - the feeders of New Orleans's lavish belly - shines through. In the acknowledgments, Brite says she completed Soul Kitchen the night before Hurricane Katrina hit. The book is most eloquent as a postcard of New Orleans before the flood - of everyday life as it was before that didn't exist anymore." - Field Maloney.
¶ The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs, by Irvine Welsh. "Although it fails at every imaginable level - metaphysical, ethical, technical, thematic - it is at the stylistic level, the level of the sentence, that Welsh's novel is most wanting. ... Nor is this what George Orwell fondly called good bad writing. This is bad bad writing." - Robert MacFarlane.
¶ Short Dog: Cab Driver Stories from the LA Streets, by Dan Fante. "Dan Fante's world is unremittingly ugly, but like Ishmael he has lived to tell the tale. In his father's novel The Road to Los Angeles, Bandini's Filipino co-workers command him to 'go home and write book about puke.' Dan Fante has. Luckily, this writer has the telemarketer's skill for keeping the mooch on the line: readers who don't hang up right away very likely won't be able to stop listening." - John Wranovics,
¶ Fiction Chronicle. - Andrew Santella.
¶ A Tale of Two Sisters, by Anne Maxted. "But Maxted succeeds in capturing the ways people can talk past each other and miss connections with even those they need most in the world."
¶ The Seducer, by Jan Kjaerstad (Translated by Barbara J Haveland). "Veering from the broadly comic to the beautifully sad, with detours for deadpan meditations on the "Norwegian national character," this book is not just big (606 pages) but big-hearted."
¶ Nightwatch, by Sergei Lukyanenko (Translated by Andrew Bromfield. "The pervasive atmosphere of gloom ends up choking the life out of this novel. You know you're in trouble when even the talking owl has nothing of interest to say."
¶ Three Days to Never, by Tim Powers. "If none of that makes complete sense, be warned that matters might not be much clearer after you've finished this novel. It's not that Powers's endlessly inventive tale doesn't hold together, it's just that you might enjoy it more if you don't sweat all the details."
¶ You're Not You, by Michelle Wildgen. "This closely observed novel illuminates some of the ways debilitating illness transforms not only those stricken but also the people who care for them."
Nonfiction
¶ James Tiptree, Jr: The Double Life of Alice B Sheldon, by Julie Phillips. "But in Julie Phillips' engrossing and endlessly revelatory biography, the woman behind the alias is at last allowed to step into the spotlight, emerging as neither a malicious prankster nor a defiant contrarian, but simply as a writer for whom science fiction proved to be the ideal genre to tell her own story [in?]." - Dave Itzkoff.
¶ Jeans: A Cultural History of an American Icon, by James Sullivan. "This archetypal American garmet owes its fortunes to a heady combination of celebrity and big business. And it is commerce that Sullivan devotes most of his attention, focusing in exhaustive, sometimes exhausting, detail on the history of the denim industry, beginning with the grandaddy of all jeans moguls, Levi Strauss." - Caroline Weber.
¶ I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman, by Nora Ephron. "But lately Ephron has learned that there is one betrayer upon whom no woman (with the possible exception of Cher) can exact vengeance or impose a fairy-tale finish: the body, with its dazzling flurry of early gifts, and its misleading air of permanence." - Liesl Schillinger.
¶ LBJ: Architect of American Ambition, by Randall B Woods. "But in writing [this book], Woods has produced an excellent biography that fully deserves a place alongside the best of the Johnson studies yet to appear. He is more sympathetic and nuanced than Caro, more fluid and (despite the significant length of his book) more concise than Dallek - and equally scrupulous in his use of archives and existing scholarship." - Alan Brinkley.
¶ Malory: The knight Who Became King Arthur's Chronicler, by Christina Hardyment. "Faced with the regular invisibility of her central character, Hardyment fills the vacuum with blizzards of diversionary details the serpentine genealogies of nearly every English family she mentions, a description of how ink was made from lampblack or the caustic gall of an oak tree, an overview of several centuries' worth of English law on the subject of rape." - Paul Gray.
¶ Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission, by Thomas H Kean and Lee H Hamilton with Benjamin Rhodes. "Told in a dry, colorless style, like the report itself, the book offers little new information on the actual attacks, but provides a keyhole view of the commission's bureaucratic war with a White House obsessed with secrecy and control." - James Bamford.
¶ Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death, by Deborah Blum. "Blum tells her literally wondrous tale very well. But apart from the vague suggestion that it answered a need created by the encroachment of science on religious belief, she offers very little reflection on the question of why spiritualism suddenly became so popular." - Anthony Gottlieb.
Rachel Donadio's Essay, "What I did at Summer Writers' Camp" is a yummy compare-and-contrast of the nation's two most celebrated writers' colonies, Yaddo and MacDowell. Read it and dream.
In case you can't read it - and of course you can't - the hat says, "FASOLT & FAFNER: general contractors: fees negotiable." You can get this hat by purchasing it at Seattle Opera's Ring Cycle performances, and I expect that they'll give you one if you make a hefty contribution. But the hat is not available on-line. Therefore I had to have one, even though I don't wear baseball caps.
Thank you, DEAREST! (Who is not to be confused with my dear Kathleen.)
Here's another helping of old prose. Perhaps it's a sign of mental inertia, but what I wrote in January 2003 about the American response to 9/11 still seems to hold very well. While it's true that more Americans are against our Iraqi misadventure than ever, I don't think that much ground has been gained in the understanding of foreign mindsets. Like the Italians, we appear to believe that the full measure of what's "foreign" can be found within the various regions of our own country, and that anything more foreign than a Yankee to a Texan is somehow no longer quite terrestrial.
Rereading my comments on an essay by Joan Didion, I'm reminded how quickly death makes one remote: John Gregory Dunne was still alive then - he had almost a year left to live. Surely my piece must be more than three and a half years old!
¶ I had something of a quiet big day today, never you mind why. But I did have an unusual stroll, from a financial printer near Grand Central to Lincoln Center. The Pulitzer Fountain at Grand Army Plaza, above, was just a bit past the half-way mark. That's Bergdorf Goodman beyond the trees.
Today, I point you to some of the very oldest writing at Portico - it seems to date all the way back to 1999! It's a collection of three pieces. The first is about the unusual street on which I live - a subject that I'll be revisiting in a year or so when two new buildings continue the transformation of the neighborhood, from a German enclave to a destination shopping street. The second piece is about James de la Vega, an artist from Spanish Harlem who has been gracing the city's sidewalks with gracefully irreverent chalk drawings for years. It was written upon just having seen Mr de la Vega at work right outside my building. The third piece, I think, needs to be opened up and expanded; it's about what Howard Dietz, in the lyrics for the song "Paree," called "New York with its rush-rush-rush."
When these pieces were written, I had absolutely no idea of what I was doing on the Internet. Blogging was not even on my radar.
¶ In yesterday's Times, Terence J Daly, a "retired military intelligence officer and counterinsurgency specialist who served in Vietnam as a province-level adviser," expresses an idea that I've been chewing on for a while. If I've kept it to myself, it's because I haven't a shred of military experience. But it has come to seem to me that conventional armies are not the way to fight the war on terror. The Iraqi "insurgency" is not an army at all, but rather an uprising that rends the civil fabric. Military force, which is equally heedless of civil fabric, cannot possibly undertake its repair. Mr Daly is right, I believe, to propose a police model for our activities in Iraq. Mr Daly concludes,
Forcing the round peg of our military, which has no equal in speed, firepower, maneuver and shock action, into the square hole of international law enforcement and population control isn’t working. We need a peacekeeping force to complement our war-fighters, and we need to start building it now.
Step One would be the massive deployment of Arabic-speaking American agents. Now, I don't think it's very likely, either. Not in this misadventure; not with this Commander-in-Chief (who seems almost as innocent of military experience as I am). But next time. There's certain to be a next time.
The Drowsy Chaperone is an extraordinarily vibrant solution to the problem of what to do with Broadway's troupes of highly talented musical comedians in an unstylish age. Resuscitating the old chestnuts, as both Girl Crazy and Crazy For You showed, doesn't really work: the old shows - every musical by Cole Porter written before 1948's Kiss Me, Kate, for example - are dramatically lame. Truth to tell, the audiences of the Twenties and Thirties demanded much less of musical comedy than we do. So where are today's vehicles for divas as endowed as, say, Sutton Foster?
Thoroughly Modern Millie - the last show that we saw at the Marquis, and the last time that we saw Ms Foster - was a merely adequate solution. The songs were thoroughly forgettable, and it was hardly more possible to care about the cardboard characters, exhumed as they were from shows that David Merrick wouldn't have considered backing. The show got by on youthful cheek and charm. It ran much longer than I thought it would. Harriet Harris was great in the Bea Lillie role, especially when she wore that outfit in a huge red dragon print (she did, didn't she?). Otherwise...
I expected The Drowsy Chaperone to be much the same. But people talked about it with a different kind of enthusiasm. They hadn't just enjoyed the show, they'd liked it. Eventually, I decided that we had to see it, and I'm glad that we did, because it is a very special, and deeply moving, musical. Perhaps the most moving musical ever.
Once upon a time, gay men had to behave just like straight men. This was tough, needless to say, and it naturally created an underground world, one in which ...
Continue reading about The Drowsy Chaperone at Portico.
Ruth Draper. I shall probably always point to this page in August; over the years, Draper's monologues have taken on the weight of Hamlet's. They're "so full of quotations!", to quote Mrs Clancy in The Italian Lesson (she's speaking of Dante, beyond the first terzet of whose "Divine!" Comedy she seems fated never to get. And if "Oh, waiter, would you kindly add to that order three chocolate eclairs" no longer puts me in danger of crise cardiaque, I remember my first response to that line as if it were a page of my medical history. (The request is made by Mrs Grimmer, in Doctors and Diets.) It's easy to take Ruth Draper's monologues as early American camp, and perhaps they are. But they're something else, something that has nothing to do with camp. They're mature American satires. Ruth Draper may have been the first intelligent person to focus on American silliness.
(What did Edith Wharton make of her? Did they ever connect?)
Gay fans kept Ruth Draper alive from the time that she died, shortly after recording a bunch of her routines at Yale in the mid-Fifties, until fairly recently, when, like so many gay crazes, she was de-cryogenized and released into the general culture, to quietly mounting acclaim. Any real fan ought to try to obtain her correspondence. It is very Yankee and sound. When her lover, an Americo-Itlalian poet almost half her age, crashed into the Mediterranean in a plane that he was flying in order to distribute anti-Fascist leaflets, she was broken-hearted but determined to carry on. The three years that they had together remained her golden age. It is immensely touching to read the letters in which she talks about it - which she does not do, you may be sure, at length. She may have been a comedienne, and a rich one, too (she earned a fortune), but her heart beat not too differently from Pagliaccio's.
"So often that's how trouble starts." Just say that to Kathleen, and her eyes will glisten at you as she decides on the right smile. And the right riposte.
This page is rather grandly entitled "The Novels of Ian McEwan," but only one of this great writer's novels is discussed, and that his most recent, Saturday. Even worse, the "discussion" turns out to be an assortment of "random notes." I have tidied up a few blots and, in two instances, altered the wording. But I've let the pretension of comprehensiveness stand. Aside from a collection of stories, I've read all of Mr McEwan's work, and I have dreams of rereading it and adding more pages to Portico. These dreams seem, I must say, incredibly fantastical these days, as I struggle to tread new books. That's right - tread books. Treading water is hard enough to keep up for a long time; treading new books is the Stairmaster of the mind: very wearing. Will I ever re-read anything? (NB: the Never Let Me Go re-reading is on hold at the moment, while new participants get their copies, making the project a reading/re-reading.)
Of Half Nelson, I can't think of much to say. The film was frightening to watch because its central figure, Dan Dunn, a bright and engaging middle school teacher who also happens to be a drug addict, looked like a big mess about to go into terminal mode. It was surprising that Ryan Gosling made his character more appealing as the film went on, not less. Instead of just looking at him, reprovingly, I began to see the waste land that confronted him. The film left Dan's dependency problems unresolved, although the next step would appear to be a return to rehab.
Dan seemed, at the end, to be accepting the help of one of his students, Drey, played magnetically by Shareeka Epps. But what this help might amount to was anything but clear. Drey has a gritty resolve that one expects will keep her out of trouble, and yet she serves Frank (Anthony Mackie), a drug dealer for whom her brother took a rap, as a mule. Dan vehemently opposes Drey's "association" with Frank, but calling-the-kettle-black problems cloud his message.
(Where was this film shot? That bothered me a lot. Parts of it looked as urban as Brooklyn, but many locations were far more exurban. Maybe it's just that I don't know Queens very well.)
Director Ryan Fleck wrote the screenplay with Anna Boden. Andrij Parekh's jittery cinematography suits the film well, but hardly makes it pleasurable to watch.
Every time I bake a soufflé, I wonder if this will be the first - the first to fail, that is. But I seem to have had an excellent instructor in Julia Child. When I went back to Mastering the Art of French Cooking to improve my technique, I discovered that there was nothing to improve: I had simply made a habit of following the rules laid down therein. As long as you're careful about separating the egg yolks and whites, and don't run a conga line through your kitchen (and don't open the oven door to check on the dish!), everything will be fine.
The monster above was made when our friend Jim brought over a bushel of fantastic, exotic mushrooms from his brother's farm in Ohio. A little over three years ago.
David Auburn's Proof is one of the strongest plays that the American theatre has produced in the past twenty-five years. It has proved to be an engaging drama with a wide popularity. Although its protagonist, Catherine, is a mathematician, and much of the drama concerns a proof that may or may not have been worked out by her mathematician father, the play's appeal lies in a gifted person's struggle to be taken seriously. Neither the graduate student who may or may not want to steal the proof in question nor her bland and conventional sister seem capable of regarding Catherine as anything but a wreck. Which is of course what Catherine looks like. What she has to teach them is that their attitude toward her is what's keeping her down.
Although Gwyneth Paltrow is surprisingly good in John Madden's film adaptation, and Jennifer Jason Leigh was super, too, in the role on Broadway, Catherine will always be Mary-Louise Parker to me. Ms Parker fully projected the drift, something between distraction and disorientation, of someone attending to far more important matters of the mind. She also demonstrated the natural scariness of a pretty woman who doesn't "take care of herself" - who doesn't seem to care about appearances at all.
The text of the play is available from Faber and Faber, and it makes a very good read.
The maddening thing about The Age of Conversation is that I've learned that there's a better book on the same subject, by a man whose name begins with the letter A. It is an Italian name, not French. This is maddening because, on the basis of what I've read as references to it, I have to read the other book before I can trumpet any of the insights that Benedetta Craveri's The Age of Conversation inspired.
I was talking with a well-brought-up friend this evening, about Martin Scorsese's adaptation of The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton's third-most-famous novel. We agreed that he had completely missed - I feel that I must invoke the stronger French verb, rater - the lifestyle of the American upper crust. Most people don't understand society, small s or capital - they just take it for granted. But "society" doesn't just happen. Agendas are involved, and some of them are more successful than others. And society's rules are never as silly as they seem to be. How nice it would be if they were! But they're not.
There are two crazy-different things about Western civilization. One, our music is only rarely in unison, instead of always. Which is a clue about the second thing. Second, our women are often complete citizens in their own right. It still hasn't finished even here, that drive for feminine equality. But it is no more advanced anywhere else - the paradox of the United States and the skeleton key to its grotesque conservative twitching.
In which we have a look at this week's New York Times Book Review, even though we're on vacation.
There are three strong works of fiction, this week, and I wonder how many readers will read all of them. (I've already got a signed copy of Special Topics in Calamity Physics.) Three is also the number of important works of nonfiction are reviewed this week, The Wonga Coup, The Shia Revival, and, of course, Fiasco. I hope that RumChen & Co lose no time brand author Thomas E Ricks as a giver of aid and comfort to the enemy.
Fiction
¶ Special Topics in Calamity Physics, by Marisha Pessl. It's on the cover and it gets a lot of space. "The joys of this shrewdly playful narrative lie not only in the high-low dives of Pessl's tricky plotting, but in her prose, which floats and runs as if by instinct, unpremeditated and unerring." - Liesl Schillinger.
¶ A Woman in Jerusalem, by A B Yehoshua. "This novel has about it the force and deceptive simplicity of a masterpiece: terse (or relatively so, given than Yehoshua's novels are often long), eminently readable but resolutely dense." - Claire Messud.
¶ The Girls, by Lori Lansens; Half Life, by Shelley Jackson. "Just like certain sets of more ordinary twins, however, these two books are alike only on the surface. Their aims are as different as the styles in which they are written. The Girls, by Lori Lansens, is a ballad, a melancholy song of two very strange, enchanted girls who live out their peculiar, ordinary lives in a rural corner of Canada. Shelley Jackson's Half Life is the textual equivalent of an installation, a multivocal, polymorphous, dialogic, dystopian satire wrapped around a murder mystery wrapped around a bildungsroman." - Stacey D'Erasmo.
¶ Nancy Culpepper: Stories, by Bobbie Ann Mason. "Even in its lighter moments, Mason's fiction can inspire a yearning for something lost - whether it's a person, a place of a moment." Hillary Frey.
¶ The Scent of Your Breath, by Melissa P (translated by Shaun Whiteside. "There are moments when a little self-awareness would be welcome. One wonders, for example, how "Mum" would react to her daughter's adventures. But perhaps that is for another book. 'And because I have never had anything to lose,' Melissa confesses, as if anticipating a question from the reader, 'in pretending to have a diary I wrote a novel'." - Sheelah Kolhatkar.
Nonfiction
¶ Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power, by Psyche A Williams-Forson. "Williams-Forson shuttles easily between the language of the feminist academy and that of the personal confession, according the latter a value that, in the context of a scholarly work, may make some readers cringe. 'By my own witness, too much acknowledgment and praise of one "sista's" fried chicken over another's can suggest that the pastor is enjoying something at that sista's house other than just "the gospel bird'.'" - Matt Lee and Ted Lee.
¶ The Parliament of Man: The Past, Present, and Future of the United Nations, by Paul Kennedy. "It takes a brave man, or a blithe one, to write about the United Nations as if it had some purpose other than either to obstruct or to accommodate American policy goals. I'm not sure which category the Yale historian Paul Kennedy belongs to, but it's safe to say The Parliament of Man will earn him no credit from the America-first crowd." - James Traub.
¶ A Land Gone Lonesome: An Inland Voyage Along the Yukon River, by Don O'Neill. "Writers are human conservationists perforce, and O'Neill is a fierce protector. 'As people are eliminated from Alaska's parks, new stories cease to be created and the tradition dies,' he writes. O'Neill casts a mold of the Yukon landscape before nature takes back the last human footprint. He reintroduces us to our more