Daily Blague

The other night, after dinner, Kathleen and I were recalling the foodstuffs of childhood. Kathleen could remember hers a lot better than I could mine. I remember Chung King chicken chow mein, Chef Boy-ar-di Spanish Rice, and TV dinners (the last superseded, eventually, by varieties of Stauffer's). I remember learning that I preferred spaghetti al burro - spaghetti with butter and parmesan - to anything with tomato sauce. I remember fish sticks on Friday. But I have no idea how often we had any of these "dishes," and I'm sure that there must have been others. Meat loaf? Macaroni and cheese? (Before Stauffer's, that is.) Surely - but I don't remember them. Salisbury steaks - I think I remember Salisbury steaks.

What I remember more surely is wishing that I could cook. This was not permitted, because cooking was something that girls and women did. My mother was of the opinion that I might as well be allowed to wear ball gowns as permitted to cook. And she can't have been crazy about my objectives, which were to conduct chemistry-set experiments in the kitchen and to have good-tasting dinners. My mother was devoted to taking good care of us, but that was not enough to make her like cooking - and you have to like cooking to turn out good food. I'm convinced of it. It is simply too much work, otherwise.

In time, we all grew up and became more sensible. A few weeks before she died, of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, my mother asked me to do the cooking for what we all knew, but didn't say, would be her last dinner party. I don't remember the menu, but I do remember that it came off nicely. When I wasn't serving, I stayed in the kitchen. My mother was very, very grateful afterward - almost effusive.

Her last words, hoarsely whispered on the night she died, were directed at me. "Did you freeze the leftover ravioli?"

The things I remember.

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How typical: Dubya slept through Saddam's hanging. The want of respect is staggering, but we've had plenty of opportunity to get used to staggering arrogance in the White House. It's not that the Iraqi tyrant himself deserved respect so much as the moment of his execution that did. It was incumbent upon the President to witness and event of such symbolic importance (not so symbolic for the hanged man). But this president sleeps on autopilot.

Once I got past that headline this morning, I jumped to the Book Review and clapped my hands with delight: a collection of short stories by Colm Tóibín. I snatched a Crawford Doyle Booksellers bookmark from the jug and carried it with me to breakfast across the street. At the stroke of ten, I called the bookshop and secured a copy of Mothers and Sons, as the collection is titled.

Walking over to Madison Avenue, I was oppressed by the utterly leaden sky. The side streets were deserted. Ordinarily, it's a pleasure to be in the emptied city, but this morning it felt sinister. Shadows were nowhere; shadow was everywhere. (In the afternoon, the sun eventually peeped out.)

Then I went to Eli's, where I bought a few provisions for the coming days. I could have kicked myself when the cashier rang up the loaf of stollen that I most imprudently tossed into my basket even though it didn't carry a price tag. Twenty-five dollars! Half that would have been ample. I can't say I didn't see it coming. Well, call it a Christmas treat.

Kathleen is at the office, cleaning up. Not just organizing piles of paper, but dusting. With Pledge. The state of Kathleen's office is a scandal at the best of times, but "she knows where everything is." Except that, lately, she doesn't.

While Kathleen was out, and I, too, was dusting (as is my Saturday wont), I listened to Mozart's Messiah, K 572, and then to Bach's Christmas Oratorio. Do I have any energy left for writing a few Christmas cards?

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The Holiday may be a feel-good movie, but as a Nancy Meyers feel-good movie it's sufficiently dry and verbal to render the fantasy settings and outcomes interesting. Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslett are so unalike that they give us two movies, and their stories are told in different tonalities as well. Amanda (Ms Diaz) is a neurotic producer of movie trailers who starves her boyfriends of attention and then throws them out when they're unfaithful. It takes her about ten nanoseconds after her arrival in an English cottage to meet cute with Graham (Jude Law), the brother of the woman, Iris (Ms Winslett), with whom she has swapped homes for the holiday. Amanda and Graham fall immediately into each other's arms and then spend the rest of their half of the movie trying to have a good time without getting too serious, because Amanda will be returning to Los Angeles in a week or so. When Amanda cries for the first time since her parents' divorce (she was fifteen), she knows that she has met Mr Right, and she asks the driver to turn the car round.

I pointed out Amanda's profession because Ms Meyers plays with it amusingly, interrupting Amanda's reveries with imagined trailers about her own romantic ineptitude. I might add that the one "actual" trailer that we see - Amanda's latest production - "stars" Lindsay Lohan and James Franco. Mr Franco fires big guns with both hands without looking totally ridiculous - and that's the laugh. You realize that the action is ridiculous. This is how Ms Meyers works. She makes us register our derisive reactions to cinematic clichés without actually prompting them.

Iris, meanwhile, experiences a more layered holiday, and love sneaks up on her. Her meeting cute is with her neighbor,  Arthur Abbott (Eli Wallach). Arthur is a retired screenwriter on a walker, and once he befriends Iris, he prescribes a list of movies for her to watch that all feature women with "gumption." Iris's problem, you see, is that she is the "best friend" in her romances, never the "leading lady." This has enabled her to suffer the on-again, off-again attentions of Jasper, a bedroom-eyed Lothario that it can't have been a stretch for Rufus Sewell to play. Arthur, in turn, benefits from Iris's warmth and enthusiasm; it's not an overstatement to say that she brings him back to life. This is where the film could have been unendurably bathetic, but Mr Wallach's wary good humor acidulates the water. Meanwhile, Miles (Jack Black - he cleans up fairly well here), a composer of movie scores, circles in gently but intently. Like Iris, he puts up with too much abuse in his love-life. When Iris and Miles discuss this similarity, they seem to make a pact; and when, not much later, they manage, simultaneously but in different locations, to break the cycle, it's because each of them has drawn strength from the other. Their union at the end might be rather too much the legion of the decent (we are spared any of this couple's lovemaking, although we see the other one in bed), but that's what feel-good movies do: they make unlikely matchings seem plausible, if only until the credits roll.

The difference between the two love stories is well exemplified by each woman's experience of the other's home. Amanda's sprawling Beverly Hills mansion, loaded with comfort, allows Iris to open up and delight in her life. Iris's exiguous Surrey cottage, with its stingy mod cons, forces Amanda to face her devils - although she would have left after her first night if Graham hadn't shown up. Iris's story is a comedy of healing; Amanda's is a screwball comedy.

Repeated viewings of Nancy Meyers's Something's Gotta Give have given me some idea of what it must have been like to sit in Depression-era movie palaces and float away on Hollywood dreams. It isn't just the opulent housing and the great wardrobes. Ms Meyers is fantastically creative with the passage of time and the covering of distances. If she introduced a genii-loaded lamp into the action, her stories would not be any less improbable. But she knows that we're on to her, and she keeps us distracted us with treats. No filmmaker is as dead serious about light entertainment, and none makes it so seriously satisfying.

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Here's what I did during my Christmas vacation: I read all the reviews in nearly twenty back issues of The Nation. Including the "Spring Books" issue from May. When I get behind, I don't fool around! The Nation's criticism is so much more substantial than the trash that too often appears in the New York Times Book Review that I feel somewhat foolish for taking the latter to task every week. At the same time, I have a terrible headache. All that brainy thoughtfulness!

I clipped five essays. David Thompson's warm appreciation (May 29, 2006) of Alan Bennett's Untold Stories will be tucked into the book. I don't know where to tuck William Deresiewicz's brisk dismissal (October 9, 2006) of Richard Powers's The Echo Maker, but I had to hold on to it because it sums up succinctly my dissatisfaction with the one Powers novel that I have read, Galatea 2.2.

The Echo Maker will tell you a great deal about neuroscience, environmental degradation and the migratory patterns of the sandhill crane, but like Powers's other novels, it won't tell you much about what its laboriously accumulated information and elaborately constructed concepts have to do with what it means to be alive at a particular time and place, or what it feels like. And that, crudely put, is what novels are for.

Mr Deresiewicz is particularly struck by the fact that Richard Powers wows his readers with unstinting displays of science. He's given a pass on affect because his material is "difficult." The review traces this back to a wistful yearning for science and literature to engage in fruitful conversation.

From Matthew Arnold to C P Snow to today, there's been a vague feeling afloat that if only somehow those two modes of knowledge could be made to talk to each other, science would be humanized (whatever that means) and art made relevant to the scientific age (as if it weren't already).

I doubt this demand will ever be satisfied, for the simple reason that no one really knows what it means, least of all the people who make it. But certainly one way it won't be satisfied is by treating the novel as a container for scientific ideas.

Jon Wiener's review of Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography, by David S Brown (October 23, 2006), is valuable for cutting Hofstadter down to size, or at least for stressing the distorting effect that a dread of American fascism had upon the writer's work. Another reassessment of received truths, Eyal Press's "In God's Country (November 20, 2006), reviews nine recent books under a "church and state" rubric. Mr Press reminds us that strong religious convictions have done far more good than harm to American life, as the single issue of civil rights for Afro-Americans makes perfectly clear, and he thinks that secular liberals are too easily scared by extreme fundamentalists. In any case, religious conviction must be respected; it was to ensure that respect, for any and all creeds, that the Founders proscribed an established religion. Mr Press quotes Madison, who wrote that religion

"flourishes in greater purity without [rather] than with the aid of government." He was right. The level of religious observance in America has long dwarfed that in various European countries where official churches still exist.

One cannot hope to change the religious conviction that, say, homosexuality is wrongful without first taking it very seriously indeed.

Finally, Lynn Hunt's review (May 29, 2006) of two books about the Terror seemed worth keeping, because it makes a very important point that I hope that it's not paranoid of me to regard as extremely important these days. Writing of Ruth Scurr's Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution, Mr Hunt observes,

Scurr sets out to answer the same wrong question that has bedeviled so many accounts of the Terror. She asks how Robespierre could have come to incarnate the Terror and with it the entire French Revolution. The question rests on a double fallacy - that Robespierre is the Terror, that the Terror is the French Revolution - whose lure is easily understood.

In fact, Mr Hunt argues, Robespierre became a tyrant not by main force but by the consent of the Convention.

Robespierre undoubtedly turned many a memorable phrase because he believed that he spoke for the Revolution's most profound principles. But the other deputies only tolerated this pretension as long as the situation demanded what he offered: an ability to keep popular violence in check while indefatigably pursuing victory on the Revolution's multiple fronts and obscuring the fact that the "regime" lacked all the basic elements of rule. Once the French gained the upper hand in both the foreign and civil wars, Robespierre's days were numbered.

Mr Hunt concludes with chilling relevance.

Rumor, conspiracy, constant harping on imminent dangers, accusing political opponents of being unpatriotic, internment camps, even lists of suspects vaguely defined have all made a shocking reappearance in the US "war on terror," along with torture, a practice repudiated by the French even though they had grown up under a monarchy that routinely administered it under court supervision. If the leaders of the most powerful nation in the world can react in this fashion to the threats, albeit real, of small cells of terrorists financed by foreign powers, is it really so hard to imagine that the French responded as they did?

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Kathleen and I had lunch a neighborhood bistro yesterday, and I learned something about eavesdropping: I'm not tempted by people who are having what you would call a private conversation. If I can't hear without straining, I won't listen. Two women sat at a table right next to ours, and because the banquette turned a corner, they were very much in my view. But they spoke in low voices and I paid them no attention. Several tables away, however, there was a rather garrulous quartet of people just a bit older than I am. Even so, they seemed to belong to my parents' generation, because they weren't baby boomers. Born before the end of World War II, they started out in a decidedly less rapacious atmosphere than the one that PPOQ (born 1946) and I knew. We were consumers from the start. Anyway, it was fun to figure out who went with whom. The out-of-town couple planned to see A Chorus Line later on, in the evening; the husband had "never seen a Broadway show." On the evidence of what we overheard, there was no reason to believe that he had ever done anything but play golf.

Eavesdropping while dining alone is risky. You can lose yourself in somebody's story, only to react inappropriately - by reacting at all. Once upon a time, I overheard a fellow regale his companions with a tale about a night at a Club Med in the Caribbean during which there was a lot of drinking. At one point, the guy left the bar to get some cigarettes. When he came back, everybody was dancing. That was cool, so he got right into it. It took a round of applause for him to realize that he had entered by bar by the wrong door, and wandered into the floor show.

I burst out laughing. (He told the story very well.) I killed the laugh immediately, but of course it was too late. Hot blood flooded my cheeks, and I searched the tablecloth in vain for the "Evaporate" button. 

After lunch, Kathleen and I went to Gracious Empire, the constellation of three Gracious Home stores within spitting distance of the corner of Third Avenue and 70th Street. We hit all three. Trying to choose a picture frame, I called out to Kathleen, who was standing some distance away. I asked her if she could give me some advice. Two women standing in between us turned to me eagerly, ready to help a guy out.  

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Well, one thing we know: you're no fake. You're a genuine idiot! (North By Northwest)

One of the most refreshing Op-Ed pieces in ages appeared in yesterday's Times. In "Our Overrated Inner Self," sociologist Orlando Patterson came out and dismissed the concern for "authenticity" as an impediment to the working of civil society. It's about time. 

I couldn’t care less whether my neighbors and co-workers are authentically sexist, racist or ageist. What matters is that they behave with civility and tolerance, obey the rules of social interaction and are sincere about it. The criteria of sincerity are unambiguous: Will they keep their promises? Will they honor the meanings and understandings we tacitly negotiate? Are their gestures of cordiality offered in conscious good faith?

As Professor Patterson says, the American warp on authenticity has led the electorate to support George W Bush as somehow "real," while it has prodded the pundits and the press to suspect that Hillary Clinton is a "fake." Beyond foolish consistency, I can't see what distinguishes "real" from "fake" in these cases. Mr Bush is a genuine bully whose mind has been genuinely sealed shut as an alternative treatment for alcoholism. Ms Clinton is a politician, that is, someone whose compromises are informed by core values. (Otherwise, she would just be an opportunist.) Mr Bush is utterly insincere - you might even say, authentically insincere. Ms Clinton is obviously trying.

Trying is good. Setting out to be a better person means accepting that one is not yet a better person. "Authenticity" would prohibit self-improvement. "Authenticity" has enabled hundreds of thousands of loutish males to complain to their better halves, "You're trying to change me!" Well, yes, that is the idea: you can't become a better person without changing. And you can't change without trying to change.

Eventually, at least with persistence, the attempt produces a real transformation. Why get lost in the semantics of authenticity? Genuine transformation is good; it's more than good: it is enough. Who you were when you started out is simply not important. And there is no better example of the beauty of deliberate personal metamorphosis than the late Cary Grant.

In later life, the actor would say, "Everyone wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant." A balder admission of inauthenticity cannot be conceived, and yet the record of Grant's life - not just his films, but his personal dealings as well - could hardly have been more admirable, short of helping out Mother Teresa. He worked on himself constantly, grooming his character as scrupulously as his hair, and eventually - as Aristotle assures us will happen - his good habits made him a good man.

So take your pick. Are you happier with an inauthentic, self-made gentleman whose word is his bond and whose eagerness to make you comfortable is automatic? Or would you prefer an authentic lunk, incapable of pushing beyond the least resistance?

Historically, the concern for authenticity followed an era of widespread hypocrisy. But authenticity is not the antidote. Sincerity is. Sincerity brings hypocrisy to an immediate halt. Sincerity rules out opportunistic self-improvement. It legitimates change.

Although I'm not a religious person, I agree with the Christian proposition that we are all authentic sinners. And that, I would hope, is a point of departure.

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

Fiction & Poetry

Don Chiasson's review of C K Williams's Collected Poems is generally enthusiastic, but it complains that the poet's "outraged new poems about Iraq end this volume on a note of bluster and treacle." There are, however, plenty of quotes to allow a reader to judge for himself.

This year's final cover story goes to What Is The What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng: A Novel, by Dave Eggers. Francine Prose's review explains this peculiar title and the joint nature of the project that the book embodies. Achak Deng is a real-life Sudanese refugee whose harrowing tale was Mr Eggers's raw material.

Eggers's generous spirit and seemingly inexhaustible energy - some of the qualities that made his memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, so popular - transform Valentino and the people he met on his journey into characters in a book with all the imaginative sweep, the scope, and, above all, the emotional power of an epic.

Ms Prose also writes, "The considerable appeal of Valentino's personality and the force of Eggers's talent turn this eyewitness account of a terrible tragedy into a paradoxically pleasurable experience."

Benjamin Anastas's review of Last Seen Leaving, a "thriller" by Kelly Braffet, appears to be baffled by Ms Braffet's blending of high writing and low trope.

If only Braffet weren't so addicted to the cheaper forms of literary thrill-seeking, Last Seen Leaving might take the reader on a more satisfying ride. As it is, a novel that could have moved us as it races through unfamiliar country is content to circle the multiplex parking lot flashing a bumper sticker that reads unsafe at any speed.

I couldn't tell whether Last Seen Leaving is a genuine novel with pulp garnishes or a piece of pulp with no claim to be reviewed by the Review.

Nonfiction

First, the "big" books, or books on big topics. Christopher Caldwell takes pains to make it clear that The Trouble With Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality, by Walter Benn Michaels, is, notwithstanding its title, a book of the left, not the right.

What interests Michael is the ideology of diversity, particularly as it is enunciated in universities. For him, this ideology has a basic "trick" to it: "It treats economic difference along the lines of racial and sexual difference, thus identifying the problem not as the difference but as the prejudice (racism, sexism) against the difference." As long as no wishes ill to the poor, and as long as the poor are not made to feel inferior, there are no grounds for complaint, and no basis for attacked capitalism.

A complex but rewarding review.

Gary Hart is kind but firm about Barack Obama's The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream.

Truly great leaders possess a strategic sense, an inherent understanding of how the framework of their thinking and the tides of the times fit together and how their nation's powers should be applied to achieve its large purposes. The Audacity of Hope is missing that strategic sense. Perhaps the senator should address this in his next book. By doing so, he would most certainly propel himself into the country's small pantheon of leaders in a way that personal narrative and sudden fame cannot.

Jeffry A Frieden is similarly disappointed by Joseph E Stiglitz's Making Globalization Work, noting that, while it is "a well-written and informative primer on the major global economic problems," it offers a slate of unrealistic fixes.

However, his proposals are almost utopian in their reliance upon good will, enlightened public opinion and moral imperatives to overcome selfish but deeply entrenched private or national interests that do not share his goal of making globalization work for as many countries and as many people as possible.

Two titles might be bundled together as history. Peter D Kramer gives Putnam Camp: Sigmund Freud, James Jackson Putnam, and the Purpose of American Psychology, by George Prochnik, a very useful review. Putnam, the author's great-grandfather, was America's leading neurologist at the time of Freud's visit in 1909, and Putnam's Camp focuses on the impact of Viennese psychotherapy upon the development of a distinctly American psychology, and concludes that it was ultimately superficial.

[Prochnik] sees Putnam as an influence on Freud through negation, arguing that Freud's assertion of a death instinct in Beyond the Pleasure Principle was a rebuke to Putnam's optimism. As for America, the variants of psychoanalysis that flourished emphasized the sublimation that so appealed to Putnam even after Freud had lost faith in it.

Ingrid Rowland's review of Mysteries of the Middle Ages: The Rise of Feminism, Science and Art From the Cults of Catholic Europe, by Thomas Cahill, is favorable but not without its barbs.

Cahill loves to spin out a yarn as palpably as an old Irish bard by the peat fire, or the old Greek, Hesiod, at his blacksmith's forge, and his personal asides seem to add to this intimate, old-time atmosphere.

Ms Rowland also notes that the book is "handsomely produced, with footnotes marked in medieval uncial letters and margins filled with fanciful designs like those in the margins of medieval manuscripts." She makes it quite clear that Mysteries, while it very well might provide a magical and intoxicating introduction to medieval history for young readers, is not a serious book for adults.

There are two biographies, of Isaac Bashevis Singer and Madame du Châtelet. The latter, as you may recall, was Voltaire's brilliant lover, a translator of Newton and Mandeville into French and a formidable mathematician in her own right. Caroline Weber praises La Dame d'Esprit: A Biography of the Marquise du Châtelet, by Judith P Zinsser, for its contents, if not for its style.

Today's women will find much that is familiar in Du Châtelet's multitasking lifestyle, which Zinsser, who teaches history at Miami University in Ohio and is an expert in women's history, describes with understandable and infectious appreciation. The author's prose, though, is riddled with tiresome repetitions.

It would have behooved Ms Weber to make mention of amateur historian Nancy Mitford's eminently readable Voltaire in Love, if only to demonstrate how much more detailed and penetrating Ms Zinsser's professional book might or might not be.

In his review of Isaac B Singer: A Life, by Florence Noiville, D T Max storytells the writer's career before finally dismissing the biography. He quotes Ms Noiville and then scolds her for failing to answer her own question.

" ... Apparently he was repelled by something within himself. But what?"

... This short new book has plenty of pleasures - most of all a fluid recounting of the facts of Singer's life and an agreeable outsider's engagement with American Jewish culture - but we will have to wait for a harder-boiled effort to find out.

Philip Lopate writes generously about Outsider: John Rockwell on the Arts, 1967-2006, a collection of essays chosen by the critic himself. Although he faults Mr Rockwell's manner -

The author's prose is lively, lucid and direct. The downside, made more apparent over 500-plus pages, is that it can also be flippant, overcute (especially in endings), lazy and unresistant, with a preponderance of passive verbs and spritzing of vague positive adjectives.

- he finds that the collection

also provides a valuable record of the cultural period through which we have just passed: an enthusiastic verbal snapshot album of everyone from Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen to Shostakovich and Mark Morris. Finally, it offers invaluable insights into the evolution and career of a working critic, one who has survived the many fashion shifts in pop and high culture by remaining optimistic and young at heart.

Food writer Julia Reed is scathing about A Stew Or A Story: An Assortment of Short Works, by M F K Fisher. The fault isn't Fisher's - "I don't know a journalist working today who wouldn't wince if every submission he or she had ever written ... were dredged up for all the world to see - but that of editor Joan Reardon.

In this collection, spanning five decades, Reardon has gone past the bottom of the barrel - she has gone beneath it. ... most of the subject matter really is plain old gastronomy. There is precious little of the other stuff of life, and what there is has been recycled.

Finally, there is Mark Sussman's Nonfiction Chronicle.

¶ Lone Wolf: Eric Rudolph: Murder, Myth, and the Pursuit of an American Outlaw, by Maryanne Vollers. "Vollers's account is minutely detailed and wide-ranging (bomb mechanics, paranoid politics, criminal psychology, Appalachian folklore), opening up the many dimension of her tale without disrupting its cinematic momentum."

¶ Feather in the Storm: A Childhood Lost in Chaos, by Emily Wu and Larry Engelmann. "Feather in the Storm lacks the insight and artistry of a first-rate memoir, but it is an effective testament to what Mao's social experiment inflicted on one girl."

¶ Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: A Biography, by Piero Melograni (translated by Lydia G Cochrane). "The result is too limited to become essential reading on Mozart, but is absorbing as a filial psychodrama, depicting Mozart's slow emergence from the suffocating embracing of his father Leopold, the quintessential stage father."

¶ Ninety Miles: Cuban Journeys in the Age of Castro, by Ian Michael Jones. "James, the Venezuelan bureau chief for The Associated Press, adds some cursory historical context to the raw anecdotes he strings together, but fails to construct a narrative worthy of these poignant memories."

¶ Blind Into Baghdad: America's War in Iraq, by James Fallows. "By virtue of cautious, patient reporting, Fallows anticipated some of the Iraq war's missteps, and it the articles in Blind Into Baghdad seem to arrive at what is now the conventional wisdom, he go there before the journalistic pack."

Paul Collins's Essay, "Jefferson's Lump of Coal," discusses the haughtily anti-Jeffersonian pamphlet that Clement Clarke Moore wrote nearly twenty years before "A Visit From St Nicholas." Moore attacked the 1804 incumbent of the presidency for, among other things, a belief in (pre-Darwinian) evolution, racism, and Francophilia.

True, Moore created the sentimental family Christmas. But he also touched on what Americans would clobber one another over for the remaining 364 days of the year.

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It's the day after Christmas, which for almost everybody means "back to work," but not for us: Kathleen will be taking the whole week off. Hurrah! Not having had quite enough of PPOQ and LXIV at dinner last night, we are going to meet them this afternoon in the Petrie Court Café, at the museum, for a spot of lunch, after which we'll descend into the bowels of the Costume Institute to have a look at the clothes that kept Nan Kempner on the best-dressed list. (Ms NOLA and I have already been. It's quite a show.)

At about four-thirty yesterday, I summoned Kathleen from her bead-work to a small table in the living room, where I had set out champagne, crackers, and an ounce of sevruga caviar. I had bought the caviar on an impulse at Agata & Valentina on Sunday. It was scandalously expensive - $90! Of course, it's a miracle that there's caviar at all. Beluga isn't available anymore, having been outlawed in order to stop the overfishing, but sevruga, which is our favorite anyway, and ossetra are still on offer. But the prices have jumped. It seemed very much worth it, though, as we relaxed for little while in the late afternoon, before getting ready for dinner. The caviar tasted better than ever, and icy champagne was the perfect accompaniment.

When we arrived at Brasserie LCB - the former Côte Basque - the room wasn't half full, but when we left, the joint was packed. Everyone I bumped into seemed to be French, or at least francophone. It was as though chef Jean-Jacques Rachou had planned a home-away-from-home event for the expats. The warmth of the room was positively Dickensian. Kathleen and I have been to the bistro before, but this time I really missed the soft loveliness of the old place. I even missed the rustic harbor murals, which I was never keen on when they were hanging. Now it is all very Toulouse-Lautrec. And that's great; but I did feel a pang for le temps perdu.

Perhaps because I was having such a good time talking with our friends - and ribbing PPOQ mercilessly for wearing this homeless-person sort of garment over an elegant gold shirt, just as he did at our party last week - I didn't really attend to dinner with true gastronomic fervor. There was a lovely winter-vegetable soup to start. It had the slightly chalky texture of vichyssoise, but it tasted, deliciously, of parsnips, and I'd like to try to approximate it. I remember that the galantine of duck was very good, but nothing more specific; I must have been talking too much. The filet de boeuf Périgourdine was just as delicious as it was the last time I had it, but I just gobbled it up instead of doing it justice. Thin slices of bûche de Noël, however, made an impression. One slice was filled with chocolate buttercream, while the other was pale and liqueur-soaked. Miam!

Having assigned myself the job of selecting the wine, I chose what turned out to be a fine Brane-Cantenac. But I did have a couple of martinis at the beginning at the end of the meal. I had unaccountably run out of gin at home! When we got back to the apartment - PPOQ had a cab ready for us the minute we stepped outside, which was amazing, given the schmutzy weather - I had a finger of Laphroaig while I got into my sleepies. I remembered what the baby-sitters used to say - "He's a very good boy - when he's asleep" - and I wanted to be a very good boy. I was out by ten-thirty. Merry Christmas!

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Two weeks ago, during a busy week, I had back to back chamber concerts, first at Zankel Hall and then at the 92nd Street Y. They were very different evenings, but almost equally enjoyable.

On the Tuesday, I heard Ton Koopman lead the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra in two works by JS Bach, the Musical Offering and the Coffee Cantata. Something, in short, for everybody. The cantata is a sort of chamber opera in which a grumpy old papa tries to get his fetching daughter to abandon the (then burgeoning) coffee craze. After numerous threats, she at last concedes - but it's a sham concession, since her new husband is going to have to allow her to drink all the coffee she wants. As such, it's a domesticated version of the very popular buffa plot exemplified by La serva padrona, and about the only instance I can think of of Bach's following fashion. Klaus Mertens sang the part of the father in a heroic basso, while Bettini Pahn as the daughter showed a lovely soubrette voice. Tenor Otto Bouwknegt, as the fiancé, sang with a strong but pleasant voice.

As for the Musical Offering...

Continue reading about chamber music at Portico.

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This is to wish you a happy holiday, and to thank you for visiting the Daily Blague. It's also to remind you that my birthday falls on the Twelfth Day of Christmas, and that what I really want this year is to hear from you about how you think the DB, Portico, and Good For You are - well, good for you, or not. You may comment on the DB or write to me privately, whichever suits you better.

There are days when I think that I know what I'm doing here (beyond simply writing a lot of stuff), and then there are days when I feel quite fatuous and dim for even imagining that I know what I'm doing. What I do know is that nobody has done this before. I also know that I've made, particularly in the past nine months, a lot of choices that have narrowed the scope of the project. Or you might say that it's more focused. Either way, I wonder if I have made good choices. Only you can tell me.

Thanks again for fitting me in to your busy life!

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American readers may be forgiven for expecting a novel translated from the German to be anything but funny. Thanks to the oeuvres of Thomas Bernhard and Elfriede Jelinek, they may well expect all novels written by Austrians to be tedious or distressing. So before I say anything else, may I declare (!) that Daniel Kehlmann's Measuring the World (Knopf, 2006)is richly funny. It's a lot of other things as well, but, for the moment, I recommend it to you as a funny read.

Mr Kehlmann's subtle humor has been adroitly captured by Carol Brown Janeway's translation. I know this because I was lucky enough to show up at a severely underattended event in NoLIta at which the author gave his first reading in English ever, and it was clear that the laughs and the smiles were right where he expected them to be.

The gendarme wanted a passport.

There was no way he could know, said Eugen, but his father was honored in the most distant countries, he was a member of all Academies, had been known since his first youth as the Prince of Mathematics.

Gauss nodded. People said it was because of him that Napoleon had decided not to bombard Göttingen.

Eugen went white.

Napoleon, repeated the gendarme.

Indeed, said Gauss.

The gendarme demanded his passport again, louder than before.

Now, if that passage doesn't make you smile; if you miss the slapstick ineptitude of Gauss's expecting a Prussian policeman to be favorably impressed by the high regard of Napoleon, then perhaps Measuring the World is not for you. This novel has plenty to teach, but a certain comfort with history, or at least a ready willingness to consult Wikipedia, would appear to be a prerequisite.

Continue reading about Measuring the World at Portico.

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¶ Proposed Rules of Thumb for a Sunday Afternoon Gathering in Manhattan at Holiday Time.

.5. Know where the vases that you might have to use are.

1. Unless your guests arrived in wheelchairs or on the arms of attendants, they will have been out doing something the night before, and they are probably planning to do something else when they leave your house. Because these doings will probably involve alcohol, your friends are likely to be unaccountably abstemious chez vous, so don't bother stocking up for a rout. A few magnums of a good house wine that you'll be happy to drink yourself will do the trick. Ditto beer. Even soda may not be in much demand. What might be nice are individual bottles of sparkling spring water and a pitcher of New York's finest, accompanied by tumblers, ice, and a bowl of cut-up limes. Clear away the bric-à-brac and set up the bar where it belongs, on the sideboard. You will not always have a balcony.

2. Do your friends take good care of themselves? If so, then offer no more than one variety of cheese for every four guests, plus one extra wedge. Explorateur and reblochon are always popular, as is Parrano Gouda. Nobody is going to eat blue cheese, even if it's Maytag, but don't forget chèvre. Toothpicks with labels, identifying each variety, will turn out to be handy. Observe this rule by taking care of your guests even if they don't.

2.1. Grapes? Just enough for a garnish for the cheese platter. Don't forget the Bremner crackers! A bowl of Clementines will look jolly, but you may be the only person to eat them, obliging you rather rudely to run off to wash your hands the second someone finishes telling you an anecdote, or maybe sooner, and causing you to hurt your friend's feelings. Clementines may be easier to eat than oranges, but they're still juicy enough to stick up your hands.

3. Hors-d'oeuvre plates and cocktail napkins are all that is required. What were you thinking, getting out those buffet dishes? Discus?

3.1. Unwrap FreshDirect's lovely crudité platter - actually a wooden cratelet - and behold a composition that is almost, but not quite, too beautiful to eat. Put the accompanying dips into proper bowls.

3.2. Pinwheel sandwiches? These may get mixed reviews. Many will be consumed, but at the family post-mortem strong protests may be lodged. Of course, family members prefer your cooking, or they wouldn't come over so often. But your repose is essential. Stick with the pinwheels or order something else that does not require flatware.

3.6. Don't forget the dessert platter. The time to bring it out is when the tray of pinwheel sandwiches begins to look ratty. Otherwise, the table needn't be rearranged.

3.7. If a guest has brought an assortment of cookies from St Ambroeus, ditch the dessert platter and serve the cookies. The cookies will be devoured!

7. There is no point in serving coffee and tea on the coffee table in the Blue Room if guests are unaware that there is a Blue Room. You will be drinking a lot of tea, though, so keep that kettle bubbling!

8. You will forget to fill a bowl with Smartfood, and you will be grateful.

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John Curran's The Painted Veil is a great big conventional movie about romance and reconciliation set against a dramatic background, and as such it will be dismissed by filmgoers who prefer edgier fare. Its story, from a novella by W S Maugham, is sheer opera: having discovered his wife's infidelity, a British MD serving as a laboratory scientist in Shanghai blackmails his wife into accompanying him into the heart of a rural cholera epidemic (the year is 1925). On her remote hillside, the wife grows up, volunteers at the orphanage, and eventually wins back her husband's love, but of course it is Too Late. The movie is shot with the cinematic equivalent of big Verdi arias, and anyone who likes grand old Hollywood dramas will fall in love with it. The sugarloaf mountains of the Guilin region of Guangxi Province provide China's most picturesque scenery. Diana Rigg, as a French nun, is almost as craggy and every bit as beautiful. Edward Norton is very fine as the cuckolded doctor; there are things in this film that the actor has not done before. Liev Schreiber is droll as a suave cad, and Toby Jones demonstrates that he can be terrific even when he's not impersonating Truman Capote. The movie belongs, ultimately, to Naomi Watts, and for the same reason that Up at the Villa belongs to Kristen Scott Thomas and Being Julia belongs to Annette Bening: Maugham wrote great women's stories. They're period pieces now, but they still work. They were notorious for their sexiness when they were new; now they're simply and easily adult. Ms Watts is, perhaps for the first time, wholly adult. She's young and foolish but she is not a girl. This is a movie for grownups.

Speaking of adult, I saw The Painted Veil at the Angelika. As I was walking back to the subway along Bleecker Street, I saw a grotesque advertisement on the side of a building. Between the cellphone and my palsied hand, I couldn't hope for a clear picture, but this is clear enough. The legend reads "Happy Holidays from Adult Swim." Those huge mouths, full of too many teeth, are fascinating and monstrous.

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After dinner (a pizza), I decided to call our great law school friend who lives in Western Connecticut. She was home, and Kathleen was home, and we all had a great chat. Our friend adopted a Chinese baby girl a few years ago, as a single mom, something that, according to the latest news, is no longer going to be doable.

Our friend is our age, or at least Kathleen's, and having a small child in the house can be really, really tiring once you've passed fifty. What she's really tired of, as it happens, is being asked if her daughter is her granddaughter. But there's no doubting that age brings a certain distancing wisdom. Children are preposterously astute in the know-your-audience department, and I doubt that the adopted child of thirtysomethings would have dared announce, as our friend's daughter did recently, that she was so dissatisfied with the current arrangement that she planned to return to China - "after the holidays." We're talking about a four year-old. She isn't leaving before Santa Cauls.

And then I ruined our lovely evening. I overstate. I wanted to write a few Christmas cards, but couldn't for the life of me remember where I'd put them. A senior moment. Now that everything has worked out well, I see that I must learn to stop being angry with myself for these lapses, simply because, once they've flared, I'm all too willing to pour them on to Kathleen, and make her, if not the responsible party, then the person who ought to have been responsible. As conflicts go, tonight's was a mere burst of flame followed by the darkness of all's-well. I ran around for under ten minutes exclaiming that I couldn't be expected to remember everything and that I could use a little help &c,  even if it did mean following me around the apartment and taking note of where I put every little thing. (Shades of Bringing Up Baby?) While I was declaiming operatically, though, my memory was working: I remembered one thing, and that led to remembering where the cards were. I apologized profusely. I sat down at the desk and wrote the cards while Kathleen, exhausted by the ordeal, went to sleep.

She forgave me, but I am going back to China after the holidays. I'm too ashamed of myself not to.

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The New Yorker never fails to surprise me. I'd have expected to see Orhan Pamuk's "Nobel Lecture" in, say, The New York Review of Books, but it sits very nicely in this year's fina issue of The New Yorker. As it's online, you ought to have no difficulty accessing and reading it. It happens to be an excellent introduction to the writer's themes, but it also makes an important declaration: Istanbul is the center of the world.

Having been lucky enough to visit Istanbul, I have no trouble going along with this proposition (which Mr Pamuk intends to be taken figuratively, as we'll see). Istanbul is a socket from which both the West and the Middle East swing. A Turkish, quasi-secular, quasi-Islamic city today, it has left many traces of the West uneffaced. There are, of course, the great Byzantine remains, most notably Ayya Sofia. There are also the souvenirs of more recent Western influence, dating back to the nineteenth century and the final decades of the Caliphate. The fact that Turkey's modern capital sits at Ankara has had a preservative effect on Istanbul as well - if too often, as Mr Pamuk points out in his book about the city, in the form of neglect. To a greater extent than any other city that I have visited (and I have never been to Rome), Istanbul appears to exist on several time-planes at once. Some of the bizarre things that theoretical physicists say about the world feel a little less unlikely by the banks of the Bosporus.

When Mr Pamuk was growing up, in the Fifties and Sixties, Istanbul happened to be about as backwatery as it is possible for a major city to be. No longer acknowledged by the rivals who begat it, the city limped along with a rudimentary, somewhat embarrassed cultural life. To be a Turk, one crossed the water to Anatolia. To be a writer, one went to Paris. Mr Pamuk's father, an amiable bon viveur who invested his inheritance in a string of failing enterprises, spent some youthful time in Paris, where he filled up notebooks with "poems, paradoxes, analyses." Two years before he died, the father gathered up his notebooks, put them in a suitcase, and delivered them to his son, in whose success as a writer he had never had any doubt, going so far as to predict that Mr Pamuk would win the prize that occasioned "My Father's Suitcase." The idea was that, at his convenience, the son would go through the notebooks, and see if there was anything that might - and this was left wide open.

In the event, Mr Pamuk did not find anything that might conceivably appear anywhere but in his father's notebooks. Reading them appears to have been a very unpleasant experience, because Mr Pamuk loved his father deeply but could not pretend that his writing was not that of an amateur. Early on in "My Father's Suitcase," Mr Pamuk writes,

By this time, I had been working as a writer for twenty-five years, and his failure to take literature seriously pained me. But that was not what worried me most: my real fear - the crucial thing that I did not wish to discover - was that my father might be a good writer. If true and great literature emerged from my father's suitcase, I would have to acknowledge that inside my father there existed a man who was entirely different from the one I knew. This was a frightening possibility. Even at my advanced age, I wanted my father to be my father and my father only - not a writer. 

But, knowing what I know from Mr Pamuk's work, that "real fear" concealed a real hope. I expect that the contents of the suitcase were bitterly disappointing, because they were the work of a provincial writer, someone working far from the center. A writer without faith.

Orhan Pamuk has made Istanbul the center of the world by taking its complexity as seriously as possible and trying to set it in prose.

... for the past thirty-three years, I have been narrating its streets, its bridges, its people, its dogs, its houses, its mosques, its fountains, its strange heroes, its shops, its famous characters, its dark spots, its days, and its night, making them a part of me, embracing them all. A point arrived when this world that I had made with my own hands, this world that existed only in my head, was more real to me than the city in which I actually lived. That was when all these people and streets, objects and buildings seemed to begin to talk among themselves, interacting in ways that I had not anticipated, as if they lived not just in my imagination or my books but for themselves.

Equal parts courage and obsession, Mr Pamuk's identification as a writer of Istanbul constitutes exactly the commitment that every great writer makes to what we call his "material." His belief in its importance transcends argument; it even transcends love. And it signifies that, however familiar the writer may be with Dostoevsky or Kafka, he is not a provincial who wishes that he could write about Paris or New York, where the "real writers" are. The real writers, he knows, are wherever they believe in what they're writing about. There is nothing easy about this faith, because it is essentially a faith in one's own creative powers. Mr Pamuk doesn't write about Istanbul, he creates it. He displaces the physical city with the literary city, which is a thousandfold more accessible. It is a miracle that writers writers of his caliber conjure out of bravado and hard work.

The question remains: does accepting the greatest literary prize that the West has to offer make Orhan Pamuk a "Western" writer? Don't look at me. It's a litmus-test sort of question, its answer pre-determined by the prejudices of the inquirer. In a way, all writers whose work reaches the Swedish Academy's attention are "Western" writers, toiling in that capacious and cosmopolitan tent in which capturing life in words is the only real project. At the same time, the grain of Mr Pamuk's outlook is distinctly "foreign" - Turkish. That's the most important part of his faith: that he write as a Turk. Not as someone who, like his father, ran into Sartre in the streets of Paris. I expect that, at least to all fearful and ungenerous minds, Mr Pamuk will appear to aspire to both titles, "Western" and "Turkish," and to be unworthy of either.

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Last Sunday, there was a gathering at my house. I hesitate to call it a "party" because it was so sober. Joe Jervis of Joe.My.God was there, as were the Farmboyz. Édouard, of Sale Bête, arrived with his copain, as did PPOQ - who as of this writing remains blogless. M le Neveu and Ms NOLA were on hand, too. Kathleen talked with everybody while I basically watched what happened happen. Never have I - all right - given a party that required so little fuss - no fuss, in fact. Never has giving a party been so satisfying or so agreeable. So sane! It left me in a trance. While entranced, I tried to take note of the epiphany. The results as published, I hope, have been optimally de-gassed.

By yesterday, I had recovered my composure, only to find myself restless. I had an appointment at three-thirty, so I headed off to the Met for lunch, in the cafeteria. I have been to the museum so often this season that I couldn't think of anything that I wanted to see, so I headed over to the American Wing with a view to tracking its mazes. The American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art would make a very fine museum on its own. In addition to the conventional picture galleries and the period rooms, there is the Henry Luce Center for the Study of American Art, a kind of glazed attic, with racks and shelves of old chairs and china, and a few curios, such as the ivory pagoda, with its own pyramidal carrying case. There's a Childe Hassam, not behind glass I'm happy to say, that deserves a more prestigious mounting. There are even a few Sargents! But most of the paintings are portraits of venerable ancestors, many of them, unlike the sitters on the rack of Gilbert Stuarts, unidentified. The Luce Center is the Met at its barniest. I wouldn't want to fail to mention John Vanderlyn's panorama, The Palace and Gardens of Versailles. It's very woo-hoo.

Leaving the museum, I walked down Fifth Avenue in the watery, late-afternoon sunlight. It was rather gloomy, really, and very black-and-white. I felt old. How I wish that I could turn forty on my birthday, in two weeks, instead of fifty-nine. That's the bittersweet of discovering, in early antiquity, that my life makes complete sense. I'd have done so much more with my Forties if I'd known that! And I'd have known, it too. I think that I should have learned it from blogging just as quickly at a tenderer age as I have in fact.

What are you reading these days? I'm reading two books by authors appearing in From Boys to Men - a book that was much discussed and passed around on Sunday afternoon - Through It Came Bright Colors, by Trebor Healey (a novel), and You Are Not The One, by Vestal McIntyre. They are both absorbing books, but the latter is somewhat better-written than the former. More on that later. I'm also stalled at the beginning of Ward Just's new book, Forgetfulness.

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Am I the only reader puzzled by Charles Isherwood's dyspeptic take on The Little Dog Laughed and Regrets Only?* Of Julie White's Hollywood agent in Little Dog, he writes,

At the performance I recently attended, virtually every one of those [homophobic] lines got a laugh. As they were meant to. For the character’s noxious vocabulary isn’t meant to mark her as a bigot. The epithets, generally employed in acerbic monologues addressed to the audience, are meant to establish her as a funny gal, if maybe a little soulless. It seems for most people they do.

"Funny gal"? I don't think so. "Shameless" would be more like it. The audience laughs because Diane's promiscuous insults reflect impatience, not malice. They're funny pretty much in the same way that Archie Bunker's insults were funny. They tell us that Diane's bloodstream runs with iced vodka.

Is Mr Isherwood unacquainted with the glee of slipping perfectly horrid remarks into everyday conversation? With the right friend, of course.

As for Regrets Only, Mr Isherwood is looking through the wrong end of the telescope. I've promised not to discuss the plot of that show here, but I can say that "clever antigay jokes" appear to be the last thing on Paul Rudnick's mind. I should have said that the play demonstrates the importance, to everyday life in affluent Manhattan in any case, of hairdressers and florists, many or most of whom just happen to be gay. Does Mr Isherwood think that it's shameful to be a hairdresser? That hairdressers per se reflect badly on gay men? The longer I look at his essay, the more that seems to be the case.

In the film Flannel Pajamas, the mother-in-law says to the husband, "I want you to know that I believe every negative stereotype about the Jewish people." This zinger comes out of the blue, and I was not the only person in the theatre who laughed, even though there was nothing funny about the context. What an outrageous thing to say! And how gratuitous! The humor runs very deep: the Jewish husband has been very naive about the consequences of marrying a Catholic girl, and this is his wake-up call. (He sleeps through it.)

* "Anti-Gay Slurs: The Latest in Hilarity," in The New York Times, 17 December 2006.

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

Excuse me? It's the week before Christmas. Is that an appropriate time for a "Books on War" issue?

It would seem that the purpose of a "Books on War" issue would be to capture the interest of readers who do not otherwise focus on military history. War is as human an activity as there is, unfortunately, but military history (not that I've read a great deal) seems either dishonest ("war is grand") or detached. We may like detachment in a surgeon at the operating table, but writing about "armies" is creepy: we are not ants. That's why writing about war has to be special in order to hold the general reader's attention.

Fiction & Poetry

On the cover this week, we have Brad Leithauser's very good review of Robert Fagles's new translation of Virgil's Aeneid. A fine poet himself, Mr Leithauser notes that the translator's most fundamental choice is between iambic pentameter, the standard English long line, or the Latin hexameter; he also tells us that Mr Fagles's has opted for "free verse, with the ghost of hexameter serving as loose armature. Having compared a few passages from the new book and from the last important translation, by Robert Fitzgerald, in 1983, Mr Leithauser concludes,

Yet if the blazing moments belong to Fitzgerald, there's a capaciousness to Fagles's line well suited to this fast story's ebb and flow. Aeneas is a storm-tossed man - the epic opens with shipwreck on the coast of Africa - and Fagles renders the pilgrimage in cadences that are encompassing without feeling cluttered.

(Mr Leithauser neglects to advise readers to read the epic aloud, so I shall do so.)

This week's lone novel is Jane Kuntz's translation of Lydie Salvayre's "deliciously dark little desk drama," Everyday Life. Julia Scheeres calls it a "commentary on today's cubicle culture, where employees are warehoused in such tight quarters that any hiring or firing throw the entire office ecosystem out of whack." (So that's what they mean by "NSFW.")

Nonfiction

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein spends a good deal of her long review of Robert D Richardson's William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism: A Biography on storytelling, but eventually she engages with the biography and finds it wanting.

It is in using the life to grasp the philosophy that Richardson's book disappoints. Too often the philosophical positions themselves come out wrong, the emphasis cockeyed, the subtlety subtly missed.

Curiously, the reviewer's examples inclined me to side with Mr Richardson. There is no getting round the fact that James was a profoundly complicated man whose longing to be manly as well as lucid kept him from mastering the fashion of his own thought as well as his brother Henry mastered his.

Tom Shone writes an unhelpful review of John Sutherland's How to Read a Novel: A User's Guide. He does not say so, but Mr Sutherland is a dean of Trollope studies, and apparently a very gentlemanly gentleman. Perhaps it would have been wiser to assign his book to someone who did not go by a nickname. In any case, it is clear that Mr Shone is not temperamentally inclined to like, or even to try to understand, How to Read a Novel. This becomes crystal clear at the end, when he refers reader to the writings of Nick Hornby (another nickname). Mr Sutherland's book may be as unprepossessing as Mr Shone claims it is, but his claims don't sound very reliable.

War

Fareed Zakaria writes almost sheepishly about War By Other Means: An Insider's Account, by John Woo, and Before the Next Attack: Preserving Civil Liberties, by Bruce Ackerman, as if trying be "fair and balanced" about two dangerous books. The writers under review believe that the United States, as presently constituted, cannot deal with the threat of terror, and both condone a presidency untrammeled by the claims of civil rights. It takes Mr Zakaria quite a while to widen the scope of the discussion to include the "weapons" of diplomacy and foreign aid.

The United States is fighting a strange war indeed, one that is, in some fundamental ways, an extended campaign of public diplomacy against ideologies of extremism and violence. This campaign is not simply a matter of battling on the air waves with Al Jazeera across the Arab world. It is a matter of reaching into communities. The best sources of intelligence on jihadi cells have tended to come from within localities and neighborhoods. This information has probably been more useful than any we have obtained from waterboarding or sleep deprivation.

The thinking in this passage ought to have informed every sentence of the review, but in fact it appears after Mr Yoo and Mr Ackerman have been permitted to state their cases - permission that implicitly validates their shrunken, fearful points of view.

I have read another, longer review of Max Boot's War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today, and, like Josiah Bunting's here, it suggested the book in question is excessively schematized, history cut to fit a preconceived pattern. Mr Bunting states Mr Boot's thesis at the beginning of the review and follows with a book report that makes it fairly clear that Mr Boot has written a book in which only generals are entitled to respect as human beings.

Dangerous Nation, by Robert Kagan, gets a cagey review from Geoffrey Wheatcroft. Mr Kagan's thesis is that interventionism of the sort that we have engaged in in Iraq is as American as George Washington, if not apple pie. If the thesis was ever credible, that moment has passed, as Mr Wheatcroft all-too-gently hints. "Will it be surprising if America soon, and at least for a time, turns inward and aloof once more?" Less theoretical and correspondingly more realistic is Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone, by Rajiv Chandrasekaran - at least on the evidence of Michael Goldfarb's mordantly amusing review.

On page after page, Chandrasekaran details other projects of the CPA's bright young Republican ideologues - like modernizing the Baghdad stock exchange, or quickly privatizing every service that had previously been provided by the state. Some of these ideas would have been laudable if they were being planned for a country with functioning power and water supplies, and that wasn't tottering on the brink of anarchy.

But how could these young Americans have known what life was like for ordinary Iraqis since they never left the Green Zone? Instead, they turned the place into something like a college campus. After a hard day of dreaming up increasingly improbable projects, the kids did what kids do - headed for the bar and looked for a hookup. As for the Iraqis, they were conspicuous by their absence.

Presiding over this unreal world was the American viceroy, L Paul Bremer III, who comes across in this book as a man who has read one CEO memoir too many, a man who knew his own mind and would not have his decisions changed by the inconvenient reality of Iraqi life outside the blast barriers. All of this would be funny in a Joseph Heller kind of way if tens of thousands or Iraqis and thousands of American soldiers weren't to die because of the decisions made by the CPA, the Pentagon and the White House.

Mark Atwood Lawrence gives an interested but ultimately inconclusive review to Khrushchev's Cold War: The Inside Story of an American Adversary, by Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali. Mr Lawrence notes that the book is "deeply researched," but he complains that "Fursenko and Naftali never really say whether the Americans, if they had recognized Khrushchev's basic interest in peace, might have been able to strike a deal to end the cold war - or at least ease it drastically." Evan Thomas, in contrast, praises Ian W Toll, author of Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the US Navy, for his "grasp of the human dimension of his subject, often obscured in the dry tomes of naval historians."

Historian Taner Akcam can't be planning a visit to his native Turkey anytime soon, having just published A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility. According to reviewer Gary J Bass, "This dense, measured and footnote-heavy book poses a stern challenge to modern Turkish polemicists, and if there is any response to be made, it can be done only with additional primary research in the archival records."

Finally, there is Barry Gewen's War Chronicle.

¶ Finding the Target: The Transformation of American Military Policy, by Frederick W Kagan. "Kagan contends that the American military successfully transformed itself after the humiliation of Vietnam with the all-volunteer Army and upgradings of personnel and weapons, but then fell captive to dreams of dominance through technology alone, losing sight of the human component of warfare."

¶ The French and Indian War: Deciding the Fate of North America, by Walter Borneman. "It will not displace Fred Anderson's sweeping and magisterial Crucible of War, but as its subtitle suggests, it demonstrates just how important the war was in configuring the world we inhabit today."

¶ Endgame in the Balkans: Regime Change, European Style, by Elizabeth Pond. "Currently a correspondent for The Washington Quarterly, Pond could never been described as a stylist, yet she is extraordinarily knowledgeable, and after a while the sheer volume of her information begins to cast a hypnotic spell."

¶ The Occupation, by Patrick Cockburn. "He describes, for instance, a conference in London in 2002 for liberal, secular Iraqi exiles, the kind of people Washington hoped would be the country's future leaders. But very few of them wee smoking, even though tobacco is a way of life in Iraq. This, Cockburn says, revealed how out of touch the exiles were.

¶  Annihilation From Within: The Ultimate Threat to Nations, by Fred Charles Iklé. "... in many ways a deeply eccentric, and flawed, book. ... But his warnings about the dangerous conjunction of nuclear proliferation and terrorism are unassailable and point to a future much like the present."

In lieu of an Essay, ten writers on war, ranging from Barbara Ehrenreich to Anthony Swofford, pick two indispensable books on the subject, ranging from Thucydides to (Margaret) Mitchell.

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My Pittsburgh correspondent (She Who Never Comments) whiled away a long afternoon today by playing on the Internet. The appropriation of my image was involved. Kathleen finds the results "a bit scary," but I think it's jolly. It's rather sweet to be normal-sized for a moment. 

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Last week was a busy one, with two concerts and a play. The concerts were both very satisfying, but the play was such an outstanding delight that I shall try to tell you something about it now. I don't want to give away the plot, because a great part of the fun is anticipating, if only by minutes, the direction in which it goes. And I shall try not to re-tell any of the fifteen or so drop-dead jokes.

If I did tell one of the drop-dead jokes, you might not find it all that terribly funny - or, in the case of the Donna Karan joke, you might not get it all. But the New York audience at MTC's Stage I the other night didn't miss a thing. Expectations were high - Christine Baranski and George Grizzard in a Paul Rudnick play!!!! - but they were met and then surpassed. It was obvious from the start that the show was going to be funny, possibly very funny. What was not so obvious was the show's very satisfying ending. So often, comedies turn into overtired three year-olds as the finish approaches: they don't want to end, but they can't quite keep going, either. So they fuss, and when the curtain comes down the audience is simply grateful. Not so at the end of Regrets Only. The play's final moments are just poignant and sweet enough to give a dash of Der Rosenkavalier. Just a dash.

For years if not forever, Paul Rudnick's humor has operated on the assumption that gay men and women - but mostly gay men - already control the world. It is a brave, whistling-in-the-dark way of dealing with a society afflicted by patches of stolid homophobia in which gay men are occasionally beaten to death. In Regrets Only, the playwright lets his postulate off the leash and permits it to rule, if not the world, then the second act of his play. This duplex fantasy, playing on the surface but also shoring up the foundations, is the perfect catalyst for transforming pointless, empty lives into magical ones. 

Continue reading about Regrets Only at Portico.

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In the past week, I've read two books that held my attention, moved me, and yet left me feeling that I have nothing very useful to say about them. I can point to them, and urge you to read them, on a "take it from me" basis, but I can't criticize them. I don't believe that I fully understood either of them. I do believe that the limitation is mine, not theirs.

Continue reading about two books that got away from me at Portico.

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Comments are re-enabled, thanks to the persevering diligence of MovableType's fantastic support desk. Why did it take so long? Stuff happens, that's why. The manual is often useless, sad to say. But the site "works."

Which way to go? Should I tell you how awful the past couple of days have been - or at least the days until I convinced MT that I still had a right to Support (a different matter from the quality of the support once you're recognized!)? Or should I tell you how excited I am by today's blogmeet, here at my house? I've given a jillion parties over the years, but this one is hands down the most interesting-in-advance.

It's a sign of the New Me that I kicked aside any gastronomic ambitions and relied on FreshDirect for the comestibles. That said, I am totally ye of little faith. I shall insist that the three other bloggers review the afternoon's culinary offerings in pitiless detail. (And I'll translate Édouard's contribution into English myself, unless he insists.)

Bless me, Father Tony, for I have schemed. Let Joe and PPOQ form a fast friendship, and unite in healthy, if merciless, "criticism" of me.

***

Here I am, an hour before the party is to start. In a little while, I'll get dressed, but there's not much else to do ahead of time. I expect that I'll be brewing coffee and tea all afternoon, even though I may be the only partaker. There's enough wine to refill the Caspian Sea, plenty of beer, soda, and juice. I probably ought to have bought some sparkling water.

The platters from FreshDirect arrived nice and early this morning. Pinwheel sandwiches - check. Crudités - check. Chocolate-and-berries - check. Cheese -

All I'm going to say about the cheese (for the moment) is that I threw on a windbreaker and marched down to Eli's, where I spent the fortune that I had tried to save by going through FreshDirect. Because, of course, I didn't just buy cheeses. I bought holiday candies, miniature croissants, and two bunches of grapes. And, just to be sure, a few boxes of Carr's Table Water crackers. I wasn't very adventurous with the cheeses: Explorateur, Reblochon, Mimoulette, Camembert, Maytag Blue and Parrano Gouda, the kind that tastes like Parmesan. There's no way even half of it will be consumed, but the idea is to give everybody a choice. Food is very important at parties. It gives everyone something to do.

I haven't enjoyed the prospect of giving a party so much in years. I hope that everyone has fun.

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