Daily Blague

Why do I feel that I'm leaving something, when nothing is going anywhere? The only change, for me, will be no longer having to deal with MovableType, a blogging platform that I chose in 2004 precisely because it was said to be the most daunting. (And it was daunting. I discovered that I am a closet masochist.) Exchanging MovableType for WordPress is like taking off a very heavy backpack. Life is suddenly, startlingly easy. I have no regrets.

But it's true that I am leaving school. I started the Daily Blague at a strange time, right after George Bush's second victory. The Blogosphere had been hopping during the campaign and was still very lively, as the writers at political sites that I visited, such as Crooked Timber and Obsidian Wings, tried to make sense of the disaster. Eventually, I lost interest in political blogs. I lost interest in all single-issue blogs. And I really didn't know what to do with my own. For far too long, I filled it with reams of material that belonged in a different setting. I was like the bore who shows up at a cocktail party and wants to talk about the death sentence.

At some point or other, the old Daily Blague developed a serious comment-spam problem, and my Web host actually considered shutting it down, along with at least one other MoveableType site. That's when I decided to move, both to another host and to another platform. By now, I had a very clear idea of what The Daily Blague ought to look and feel like. Thanks to the heavy lifting of Searchlight Consulting, the look and feel has been realized. But as Steve Laico can tell you, I knew what I wanted.

What distinguishes a blog structurally from other Web site is, of course, its interactivity: the solicitation of comments. Most blogs don't get nearly as many comments as their creators would like, and The Daily Blague is one of them. But every comment is a lively acknowledgment that someone has been reading what I've written. I don't know why any writer doesn't keep a blog for that reason alone. (Writers who aren't celebrities, that is.) The comments that the Daily Blague has accumulated have given me a better idea of where I stand in the world than I had before blogging.

To all readers, but especially to those who were "in at the birth," I say Thank You!

Posted by pourover at 09:59 AM | Permalink

Yesterday, I had a big day. I went to the movies in the morning and to a baseball game at night. It was a very lucky day for anyone to have. Most readers will probably be surprised about the baseball part. So am I.

¶ 2 Days in Paris.

¶ The Cyclones at Keyspan Park.

Posted by pourover at 01:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Today's page isn't really old enough for pointing, but I'm full of the spirit of it. I have met so many amazing people in the past few years, all through the Internet, that I wonder if we are not on the brink of an age in which you forget about the high school classmates that you're stuck with and check in with the Trollope reading group first.

It took me a long time to grasp the central truth about parties, which is that the guest list is everything. When my parents gave parties, which was fairly often, their guest lists were virtually predetermined. In Bronxville, there were the country club friends and, less often, a circle of business people. In Houston, it was either business or St Michael's Parish. What distinguished one party from another was the occasion. In other words, the parties were virtually indistinguishable.

I live a completely different life. I belong to no groups. I know a number of interesting people who might not be expected to get along with each other. Inviting everyone I know to one big party is not a good idea, but, as I say, it took a while to figure this out.

¶ Yorkville High Street>Curriculum Vitae>Rethinking Parties.

Posted by pourover at 11:27 AM | Permalink

Like the fool that I am, I Googled myself.

Very nice that the sites show up. That was really all I wanted to know. But how peculiar that the third item on the list was our engagement announcement. Not the wedding announcement, but the engagement - Kathleen got in twice. Of course it doesn't make sense now; the Times doesn't even think of publishing engagement notices. We wouldn't make it by today's criteria.

What I "love" about the story is the absence of "previous." The way the article is written, it sounds as though my marriage to Kathleen was annulled before I left the church. The Times used to write, "Mr X's prior marriage ended in divorce," or somesuch. "Annulled" is very Catholic. I am one one of the very few men with a child from the first marriage who got to marry in the Church a second time. The marriage to C may have been canceled, but Ms G wasn't.

I don't think that my gay friends truly appreciate my hardships! They never take me to lunch.

Posted by pourover at 01:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

It's past midnight, but I've just watched a film that turned out to be extraordinarily interesting. It's not the best-made movie ever, even though it stars two pluperfect luminaries, Susan Sarandon and Sam Neill, and has even more firepower thanks to Emily Blunt, whom we finally get to see without the ridiculous eye shadow that was forced upon her face in The Devil Wears Prada. My lord, she's lovely! And equal to sicko roles, too. I think she learned the local posh dialect for this movie. Born in London and raised in Roehampton (which is still London), Ms Blunt softens certain syllables in a way that made me wonder. Mind you, when Nicole and I run off together we are going to talk totally Yankee prep.

You laugh. Kathleen just discovered that William Hurt, a/k/ka Billy Hurt, was a camper at Timanous, the brother camp of Kathleen's Wohelo. I always feel sorry for those guys, because they were stuck on Panther Pond, while the girls had Lake Sebago. On second thought, it was probably best that the boys had Panther Pond - a manageable lake - to themselves. Sebago is big. Lots of camps on Sebago, if you get my drift.

Truly fascinating. Billy Hurt, so to speak, is two years younger than I am and three years older than Kathleen. And what does Kathleen say? She tells me that I'm lucky she didn't meet him back in the day. Her fervor for the star of Broadcast News is such that I once protested that when I came back again in another life, I'll be William Hurt. Good! she pronounced.

I suppose that that means that she still wants me. Even if I look better.

Posted by pourover at 12:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

There's little or no incentive to post an entry today, because a sizable contingent of readers isn't going to check in. They're the people who like to know what Kathleen's up to, and today they can do that without my help, because she's right there with them, in Raymond, Maine, where her old summer camp sits on Lake Sebago, and where a couple of fellow counselors have weekend houses. Kathleen flew up this morning, on an eight-o'clock plane. I made the mistake of getting up with her. Twilight is far off, but I can hardly keep my eyes open.

How about all those crazy people, sitting out in the sun! Sheer madness.

In the distance is the Manhattan Psychiatric Center. It looks deserted when we drive by on the Triboro Bridge, but apparently it's still in operation. Ha! It's address is a very misleading "600 East 125th Street." What kind of a joke is that? Although within the Borough of Manhattan, the center is not on Manhattan Island, but on Ward Island, across the Harlem River. You can tell that I was visiting in the middle of the day, because the shadows projected by the wings are so thin. About now, the shadows will make the building look like the enormous sundial that, come to think of it, it is.

The weather is so beautiful that I supplemented a trip to the grocery store with a walk to Carl Schurz Park. I looked across the East River at the Astoria Houses, with, just beyond them, the much swankier Pot Cove Tower. I'm pretty sure that that's not what the luxury building, visible from our balcony, is called, but Pot Cove is what it stands over. I took pictures, but my hand wasn't steady enough. When are they going to make cameras without push buttons?

Posted by pourover at 07:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

When I was a boy, there was something amazingly rectifying about Good Queen Bess - Elizabeth I. She was a Marie-Antoinette who knew how to rule. Both women understood the power of attire, but of course only one of them was the sovereign. I was terribly sad about MA when I was young, but I was correspondingly keen about Elizabeth. She invented Shakespeare!

As one grows up, the story becomes complicated. Elizabeth was a terrible procrastinator who hated making decisions, not because she was lazy but because she doubted her own abilities. She was, after all, a woman, in her own mind, a weak vessel. But she always rallied, and her people loved her. She was the first female sovereign to claim widespread appeal. I liked the idea of a woman in charge, even before I knew that Elizabeth was madly seeking the best advice of her male advisors.

It's utterly impudent of me to say so, but I wonder what the Virgin Queen and I would talk about were we to have a lunch date. Elizabeth is second only to Mme de Pompadour as my Fly on the Wall candidate, but when it comes to guts of actually meeting somebody, I think I'd be more comfortable with Elizabeth than with La Pomp. Elizabeth would size me up in a minute and declare me ignorant of Latin (she'd get to Greek later), and then say something perfectly anodyne: "I hope that you have been made comfortable." Ach, what have I said. That's Elizabeth Two. The first queen would have said, "I'm glad you can dance, Mr Keefe."

¶ Dates>History Books>Elizabeth: the Young Gloriana.

Posted by pourover at 12:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Photo by Max Newell

Last Tuesday, I got to meet some old friends. I don't know just how long I've been corresponding with Bostonians Amy and Max Newell, but it's pushing three years. Nor do I recall how I came upon Amy's Web log, The Biscuit Report, a site focusing on the Bush Administration's sick venture into torture. We've been writing, chatting, and even telephoning ever since, but on Tuesday we finally got to shake hands.

The Newells were paying a visit to an old friend in Park Slope, and when I heard that they were coming, I naturally thought about hopping on a southbound train. It would be much easier to move me from one borough to another than for them to bring their two children - Ari, four, and Aya, seven months - into Manhattan. So I thought. But Ari's parents wanted him to experience the Guggenheim Museum, so we agreed to meet at the Barnes & Noble just above the 86th Street subway station. (Max, who shares my interest in transit, asked if anyone still refers to the once-distinct subway lines as the IRT, the BMT, and the IND, and I had to admit that only fossils like me do so.)

We had a grand summer afternoon. At the Guggenheim, we took the elevator to the top of the ramp and then moseyed on down, urged on by Ari's sweet impatience to see the "pond" at the bottom (which he hadn't noticed when we were standing right next to it upon arrival). Then we walked the few blocks to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where our sole objective was to have lunch in the child-friendly cafeteria. Then we had a walk in Central Park. On two occasions, Amy and I sat on benches, with Aya in her stroller: first, at Conservatory Water, when Ari led his father on an expedition around the perimeter of the boating pond, and, second, just to the west of the Bethesda Fountain, while Ari commanded the sort of big rock that draws little boys like a magnet and that, from time to time, sends them to the hospital. Max was the obliging vizier to Ari's sultan. "You're getting to see a lot of Max," Amy sighed, "from a distance."

Bow Bridge, one of the Park's beauties, was just a few steps from our second perch, but it was ill-advised of me to lead the Newells across it, because what's on the other side is the Ramble. The Ramble is no longer dangerous, at least by daylight, but its paths are evidently not a Central Park Conservancy priority, and navigating its hills and dales with a stroller was not amusing. Nor was walking along one of the drives in blazing sun. Eventually, though, we found ourselves at 85th and Fifth. Soon after that, we found ourselves in my flat, with a nice cup of tea.

Perhaps because we were at My House, it was here that Ari decided that I was not just a transient adult. Could he jump up and down on the sofa? No. Okay; could he slither across it like a worm? Fine, but not if his "slithering" was more like the hopping of a toad. I can't tell you how much I enjoyed these negotiations. For me, there is nothing so exhilarating as engaging with a bright child of Ari's age, because under no other circumstances do I get to see human intelligence openly arranging itself. Amy and I agreed that people who complain about children who "test limits" are missing the point; the child who is capable of a maddening barrage of finely-tailored requests for permission - if I can't do that, can I do this? - is simply ingenious. Ari Newell is very ingenious. He's a good fellow, too; his lovely sister already adores him.

Confucius says (on page one!) "To have friends coming from afar: is this not a delight?"

Posted by pourover at 10:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Like you, I am distressed to learn that The Weekly World News is folding. Now George will have nothing to read every week. Seriously, I loved the paper. Who else could deliver headlines such as "DINOSAURS - HONKED JUST LIKE BUICKS"? Do you remember the story about the overweight lady who was compelled to purchase two airplaine seats, because of her "titanic tush?" Oh, the laughs.

August begins early at the Daily Blague - it begins today! I spent so much energy on podcasting last week that I never got round to writing up a book. I never got round to reading one. Not until yesterday, anyway. So I offer no link, this morning, to Portico. You wouldn't follow it if I did. It's summertime!

Come September, there will be a new Daily Blague, complete (one hopes), with podcasts that you can actually hear without maxing the volume. "Sing out, Louise," as one friend wrote. Yesterday, Miss G gave me some thoughts about how to make podcasts downloadable (she also asked if I'd come along to a ball game in Coney Island! Bien sur!). The new site is already up. All I have to do is massage the style sheet - doesn't that sound like fun?

Posted by pourover at 10:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

For the second weekend in a row, Kathleen decided not to go in to the office. She has plenty to do, but she finds that she’s more productive after she has taken a few days off. For the first time in almost two years, she can actually fit everything into a lengthy five-day week.

We celebrated in various ways. On Friday night, we went to the last showing of No Reservations. Imagine, two movies (for me) in one day, and both of them excellent. Then, last night, we had dinner at Orsay. Orsay is a Franco-Upper East Side establishment that’s rather posher than a bistro but much more relaxed than one of the old temples of gastronomy. I repeated the dinner that I had when we went there a few weeks ago: gazpacho followed by a terrine of duck pâté. Accompanying the pâté was a small container of seasoned fleur du sel – and never have I found salt so delicious. Kathleen sprinkled some on her salmon and was also transported.

If Kathleen can stay away from the office on Sunday, so can I. Aside from writing this entry, I’ve nothing to do with my day job. Well, not directly. I’ve read the Book Review, of course, and most of the Times. I’ve finished one novel, Min Jin Lee’s Free Food For Millionaires, and begun another, Andrew O’Hagan’s Be Near Me. Next up: Christian Jurgensen’s The Exception.

Here’s hoping that you had a good weekend as well.

Posted by pourover at 07:18 PM | Permalink

The sound of music creeped in my ears this morning, as I was sorting through the Times. I whistled for a bit before recognizing what I was whistling as Brahms's Violin Concerto. Suddenly mad to hear it (this is why I have a lot of CDs - I never know what I'm going to be mad to hear), I put on Itzhak Perlman's recording for EMI. And although I knew every note, the concerto was entirely new. I had never heard this before. How voluptuous, how art nouveau the music sounded! Could this really be Mr Last Classicist? Was it possible that Brahms was all about nothing but pleasure?

Moments like this, when a familiar thing re-presents itself in an almost shatteringly new light, don't happen often anymore, and I'm treasuring it.

Posted by pourover at 01:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Last Friday, Eric and I went up to he Cloisters. Visiting this offshoot of the Metropolitan Museum of Art has become an annual event. Given good weather - and Friday's weather was perfect - the visit is so completely agreeable that it's impossible to tell whether The Cloisters itself or the park surrounding it was the destination.

The Cloisters is one of New York's most notable institutions. It is the most comprehensive assemblage of medieval European architecture outside of Europe. The ancient bits have been built into a sympathetic structure, with medieval-looking limestone interiors, that is laid out to facilitate a walking tour through successive centuries. "Written in stone," it is both old and new at the same time; from the moment you enter the Froville Arcade, time doesn't so much stop as gel. If you have known the museum for as long as I have - at least forty years - it is beguilingly easy to tick off the rooms in order. Every once in a while, something is moved, but The Cloisters goes on, as if it really were an opulent monastery in medieval France.

But then the jaded eye blinks and begins to see again. There are changes everywhere. They're small, for the most part, but they add up to the conclusion that a new abbot is in charge, so to speak. James J Rorimer is no longer directing the museum. (Nor is Thomas Hoving still an Assistant Curator!) Comparing the guidebook that I've very luckily held on to from the Sixties with the one that was published two years ago reveals some interesting shifts.

The Cloisters, in short, has a history of its own.

¶ A New Look at the Cloisters.

Photo by Eric Patton.

Posted by pourover at 12:00 AM | Permalink

This morning, I surprised Kathleen with breakfast in bed. The usual things on the big plate: soft-boiled egg, sausages, and a yummy fresh croissant. But instead of cranberry juice and grapefruit, we had orangeade and watermelon.

A few hours later, I had breakfast all over again, in the form of brunch. Eggs Benedict at Nice-Matin, the snappy eatery at Amsterdam and 79th. Kathleen lured me to the West Side with the prospect of an afternoon meal in a different part of town. Also, there were shops to visit. In the Endicott, behind the Natural History Museum, there's a shop called Pondicherri. They sell Indian fabrics and knick-knacks. They've lost their lease, and everything must go. I picked up fourteen fabric swatches that are just big enough to use as napkins. Even if they don't go together in the strictest sense, they get along nicely. A dollar apiece! Badly needed. It has been a long time since I bought everyday cotton napkins, and it shows.

At another shop that we visited, I forgot about and didn't see the step up to the pavement as I was leaving. My left hand jerked downward into my pocket with such force that it ripped apart about five inches of seam. It was not a pleasant form of ventilation, and now I must perform the ritual casting-off of torn trousers.

You should have heard Kathleen sputtering this morning, reading this story about virtual pets called Webkinz, and how Mom has to take care of them when the kids go off to summer camp...

Posted by pourover at 05:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

This afternoon, an idea that was born in pique took root in deeper soil. I thought of those Vietnamese monks who burned themselves. Immolation.

I'm a gifted writer, I think, but what difference does that make in this Bush-addled world? Why say anything at all when the Stupids are in charge? (My contempt, really a kind of fear, for people of average or lower intelligence cannot be concealed.)

What if I were to plant myself in the lobby of this very busy building and drink a tumbler of bleach? It would be an awful death, hideously painful, but I would have announced my protest in advance. I would, as a child of Catholic teaching, "offer it up." To you. Stop watching television.

I'd want to be very sure that there was nothing that anyone could do to save me.

Posted by pourover at 07:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

For years, the washers and driers in the laundry room on each floor of our building took quarters - more and more of them as time went by. That was a nuisance, but in the end I'd rather go back than use the cash cards now required. The cash cards can be loaded only via machines that ingest $20 bills. They are very picky about the bills.

Instead of taking my wallet downstairs when I went to collect the mail, I slipped a twenty into my pocket. The elevator ride was long, with so many stops that I had to close my book to make room. The part of the lobby where the money machine is located was a nest of yakking moms and querulous kids.

The money machine wouldn't take my twenty. I kept trying. Then the bill fluttered to the floor - followed quickly by the (empty) cash card. I was so overtaken by disgust with my housing situation  (I am SO TIRED of strollers, their occupants, and their operators) that I slammed the book onto the floor, making quite a pop. The lobby went completely silent. I scurried away intemperately.

The Vitamin B-12 injections have been working wonders, but I see that there are limits.

Posted by pourover at 06:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

A few months ago, I had an idea. If I were younger, and in possession of a proper basement, I'd have probably made the thing myself, but my DIY days are over. I mentioned my idea to someone who was doing some work here, and he said that he knew a carpenter. We took the relevant measurements and he drew a simple picture, just to be sure that he knew what I wanted. A couple of weeks later, I got a call from the carpenter. Last week, I trekked over to Midtown West and picked it my latest piece of furniture, pictured above.

The idea is to stow the computer keyboard neatly when I want to use the desk in some old-fashioned way that involves perusing large reference volumes or signing checks. As realized in choice Japanese honiki wood, it does exactly what I want it to do and it looks like a shrine.

Posted by pourover at 09:00 AM | Permalink

A message from our law school class secretary urged me to sign up at the alumni website. As a Double Domer, I thought I might as well. But the password requirement was, I thought, kinky. Passwords were to be at least eight characters long, with one number, one upper-case letter, and one lower-case letter. My mind stalled; I couldn't think of anything that I'd be remotely likely to remember. I considered just chucking it.

Although I have a few good friends from law school, I have none whatever from my undergraduate days. There's a brilliant guy at, last time I looked, Catholic University in Washington, with whom I've exchanged a few brief notes over the years - and I do mean "a few." Three or four. I have not been back to Notre Dame since Kathleen and I drove off in 1980. The two of us were sobbing about what we knew was the end of a great circle of friends - you had to be there - and, although we had both given up smoking for some time, we must have gone through six packs of cigarettes on the drive to New York.

I was not a practicing Catholic at any time during my two terms at Notre Dame, and since my time there I've grown to be somewhat anti-Catholic, or anti-Church, so I find the university's self-promotion as a Catholic institution seriously off-putting. And I'm offended, although I don't quite know why, by the alumni website's name, Irish Online.

In case you didn't know it, the Golden Dome atop the university's administration building is a gonflement of the spires that grace the church of Sta Trinità dei Monti in Rome, the church at the top of the Spanish Steps. There is an occult connection, I suspect (the French order of Minims?), between the two buildings. Ironically, the Spanish Steps were paid for by an Eighteenth-Century French ambassador. There's a ha-ha for you.

Posted by pourover at 11:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The highlight of our pleasant summer weekend was a brief stroll in Central Park on Saturday evening. There was plenty of light in the sky, but the lamps were lighted. Providing additional illumination, swarms of lightning bugs glistened in the shrubbery, which, for its part, looked extremely kempt. The walks were tidy; the lawns were uninterrruptedly green. There were impressive perennial plantings here and there. We did not penetrate far, but loosely paralleled Fifth Avenue, from 79th Street to 72nd. We were coming from the Metropolitan Museum, where Kathleen caught the Venice and the Islamic World show on the eve of its closing, and where we had another look at the amazing (and amazingly fresh) clothes of Paul Poiret. We were on our way to dinner somewhere. Kathleen thought that there might be something casual at the Kerbs Boathouse, beside Conservatory Water (better known as the Sailboat Pond), but the place was locked up tight. We thought of heading to the other boathouse, on the Lake, where the restaurant is said to be overpriced but the setting unbeatable. It was easier to imagine the pleasures of a table near an open porte-fenêtre at Orsay, on Lexington Avenue at 75th, however, and that is just where we found ourselves a few minutes after leaving the park.

Never has Central Park looked more beautiful to me than it did the other night. Decades of attention from the Central Park Conservancy have refreshed the dreams of Olmstead and Vaux. No longer sullied by neglect and low expectations, the park was all the readier to be burnished by twilight. Close as we were to Fifth Avenue, all we could hear was the song of the birds. If the birds were jays, and not nightingales, we could at least imagine gentler calls.

I ought to spend more time in Central Park. For years, I've confined my limited Parking to Carl Schurz Park, because it's closer to home, and visited largely by the locals. (Don't forget the East River!) But Central Park has become too beautiful to miss.

I found myself wondering why no enterprising painter has taken on Central Park's charm in the way that Harold Altman has made a career in Paris's Parc Monceau.

The weekend had another highlight on Sunday, but that was family.

Posted by pourover at 12:00 AM | Permalink

Fossil Darling writes,

A thief in Paris planned to steal some paintings from the Louvre. After careful planning, he got past security, stole the paintings and made it safely to his van. However, he was captured only two blocks away when his van ran out of gas.

When asked how he could mastermind such a crime and then make such an obvious error, he replied, "Monsieur, that is the reason I stole the paintings. I had no Monet to buy Degas to make the Van Gogh."

(And you thought I didn't have De Gaulle to send this on to someone else. Well, I figure I have nothing Toulouse.)

Musée d'Orsay sounds more like it, don't you think?

Posted by pourover at 03:18 PM | Permalink

Our Fourth of July party is probably a thing of the past, given the much, much better views that we enjoyed from Chelsea last night. The downpour rather miraculously stopped just in time.

The tower at the left is the old Metropolitan Life Insturance building. I believe that it's about to be converted into a condominium. Met Life is now headquartered, of course, at what we still call the Pan Am Building, after Pan American World Airways, a now trenchant symbol of the "American Century."

Posted by pourover at 10:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

For the first time in years, we won't be hosting a Fourth of July party on our balcony this year. Neither one of us is up to it. I was willing to give it a shot, but Kathleen decided that we'd sit this year out. Or, rather, we'd visit the new apartment of one of our regular guests. He's got a great rooftop view of the fireworks, far better than ours - probably because he lives only a few blocks across town. Then we'll go out.

I went out for lunch yesterday, and quite to my surprise I ran into the parents of one of Kathleen's bridesmaids. They were dressed quite correctly for midtown - I felt like a slob even though I was wearing one of my pricier shirts - but were staying closer to home because, in view of the holiday (they said), their regular midtown restaurants were closed for lunch. Or maybe just closed. They asked after Kathleen, whom they've known since she was in the second grade.

Coming home with the best of intentions, I nevertheless frittered the afternoon away (I had been quite industrious in the morning). I chatted online; I caught up on a number of blogs; and, every five minutes or so, I went to look at the first of the four dining chairs to come back reupholstered. A Mr Solo on 85th Street rebuilt the chair before reupholstering it, so now it's both handsome and sturdy. Kathleen and I had picked out the material at Gracious Home three weeks ago, but having only seen a small swatch we had no idea how the fabric would "make up." It made up very nice, thank you. When Kathleen came home for dinner, she was as pleased as I.

Such household improvements used to delight me as only Christmas does children. Since discovering my calling, I'm rather less feverish about  householding.

Posted by pourover at 12:00 AM | Permalink

That's where you'll find me this week, in the "sandbox" of the impending Daily Blague. There will be a new URL, a new Web host, and a look and feel that may or may not be different. The platform will be WordPress, not Moveable Type, and comments will , I hope, be less of a pain. The old Daily Blague will stay where it is, as I slowly shift its less ephemeral contents to Portico. (Very slowly.) The old DB taught me a lot. The new TDB will reflect what I've learned. Portico remains, as it was always supposed to be, the heart of the operation.

This calls for business cards. People ask, what do I do. That's what business cards are for - to spare the awkward writing-down of URLs in the middle of cocktails. I'm going to have cards for both sites. The Portico cards will look just like that site's front page, with a multicolored logo over a washed out, somewhat blurred scan of a print that we actually own, Joseph Pennell's Cumberland Gate. 

As for a Daily Blague card, though, I have no ideas at all. I want it to make people smile. I'm thinking of incorporating the "About me" line under the old photo at the top of the index page: "Who is this joker?" I ask the question often enough in the blog, if not in so many words. But is it a tag I'll be still be happy with when I'm handing out the five-hundredth card?

"Eheu Fugaces" has its charms - its dangerous charms. (Speaking of Latin, don't miss this review of Diabolum Pradae vestibus indui. [Thanks, Édouard.]) Input from the Peanut Gallery would not be unwelcome.

Posted by pourover at 09:00 AM | Permalink

Not much to report... A quiet Sunday spent reading. Reading the Times. Today's Times. Yesterday's Times. The Times from Friday and Saturday of the first weekend in June. The Saturday Times for the weekend before that. It took a few hours. I also read the Book Review. When I was done with the orgy of journalism, I finished The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture. Andrew Keen's book is the sort of thing that I usually avoid, but as an Internaut with some pretensions to substance, I thought I'd better have a look.

I'll write more about this book later, but right now I'd like to say a word about the reading experience. On Friday, when I read about half of it, it seemed a prolonged rant with one or two ideas. I was satisfied that I could answer Mr Keen's objections to the Blogosphere, for example. But the second half of the book, which I read this afternoon, while somewhat overwrought, pointed to a lot of Internet issues that really need to be addressed. Such as piracy and illegal online gambling. The Cult of the Amateur is best regarded as an early warning, a canary in the mineshaft, a word to the wise. In order to make a splash, I suppose it has to be a bit overdone.

(I could tell that Mr Keen is British almost without opening the book. I was sure of it long before he revealed his interest in the football team Tottenham Hotspurs.)

Then back to one of the big thick books that have haunted the base of my bedside-books pile, Robin Lane Fox's The Classical World. Remember when I was reading this in April? I've reached the beginning of the sixth and final part of the book, with about a hundred pages to go. This book is full of dash and brio, and not unacquainted with snark. I may have to re-read Marguerite Yourcenar's The Memoirs of Hadrian when I'm through. And watch Gladiator again. Here I'd thought that when Comodus popped up on the arena of the Colosseum, the filmmakers had plunged into anachronism, not to mention lèse majesté. But what do you know? They hadn't. Mr Lane Fox reports a ghastly event in which the Emperor beheaded two ostriches and then brandished the one of the heads alongside his sword - a hint to the Senate, it's suggested. Writing on the transformation of the Repuglic into the Empire that Augustus pulled off, Mr Lane Fox confirms A N Wilson's immortal judgment, that Augustus was the Widmerpool of Ancient Rome.

(Oh, pooh. I just got round to checking prices on the DVD of the British TV adaptation of Powell's magnum opus. It's out of print! "Used and new" copies start at seventy-five pounds! So much for that. I have the tape of a tape of the original VHS. It's sort of watchable.)

Having delighted in Edward Luce's In Spite of the Gods, I want to read Sacred Games, by Vikram Chandra. It's another fat book at the base of a pile.

On Friday, Kathleen brought home a treat. I had to close my eyes &c. A book was placed in my hands - a book with a note. I knew what the note said as soon as I saw the dust jacket. It apologized for having taken so long to get an inscribed copy of Jane Smiley's Ten Days in Hills to Kathleen, who has worked with a woman who turns out to an old pal of novelist's in California. I already have an autographed copy, one that I got when I showed up for a reading in Chelsea. The thing is, I never ask for personal inscriptions. I've been told by people who know that inscribed books are less valuable than autographed ones except in the rare case where the inscribee (that would be me) is more or less as well known as the inscriber. And while I don't collect books with a view to financial gain, I expect that someone down the road will be happier to have a signed book than one that addresses an unknown blogger. However, Jane Smiley is one of the handful of writers whom I revere as people, and "To R J - All the best," with a date about a week later than my (undated) autographed copy, has taken its place on the shelf.

Now all I have to do is get famous.

Posted by pourover at 10:52 PM | Permalink

We had a power blackout here on the Upper East Side yesterday afternoon. It didn't last very long, but as luck would have it I was on the ground when it happened. I have long wondered if I'd be capable of climbing the seventeen flights to our apartment. It would appear that I am.

I had been at the doctor's, for the second of four Vitamin B-12 injections. (I think they're making a difference, but it's too early to be sure.) I walked up to JG Melon for a late lunch afterward. Then I stepped into a taxi, noticing that it seemed about to start raining. We drove up Third Avenue and turned onto 86th Street. I leaned forward, as I always do at this point, and told the driver that I wanted to go to a driveway on the far left of the intersection with Second Avenue. But the driver stayed in the right lane. I was beginning to be annoyed when the combination of his deceleration and a screaming siren made me realize that something was up. Almost instantly, I noticed the chaos at the intersection. And the blank traffic signals. Oh, no, I thought.

The problem with power failures is that nobody has any idea when they're going to be fixed. Had someone told me that power would be restored within forty minutes - well, I'm not sure that I'd have believed it. I am haunted by end-of-civilization nightmares, where things just break down permanently. Cities like New York no longer bustle with new growth so much as they totter on ageing infrastructure, which, as everyone knows, is boring to maintain. (It doesn't help that the city wasn't built with easy repairs in mind.)

Unaccountably, I'd left my cell phone charging by my bedside. I begged the doorman on duty to let me use his, and he somewhat reluctantly agreed. We had no idea how extensive the blackout was, and I wanted to connect with Kathleen as soon as possible. In the event, I was shaking too badly to press the numbers, so the doorman did that for me, too. The call failed.

Two things propelled me upstairs. I will leave one of them to your imagination. The other was the land line, which was probably not affected. Peering down the corridor to the fire stairs, I saw light. So did an older woman from the fourteenth floor who seems to know everyone in the building but has only just decided to acknowledge my existence. (How do I know she's older? Her "Vassar '48 reunion" sweatshirt. I was born in 1948.) She was intrigued by the backup lights, which are new, installed since the last blackout, in 2003. Like most residents, she couldn't believe that the management had actually done something useful, and in fact the note of scolding persisted, as if the management were still guilty of the reprehensible offense of having failed to do install the backup lights sooner.

I decided to follow her up the stairs as long as I could. What she could climb, I ought to be able to climb, even though she bears many signs of the former athlete. We went up seven flights before she paused. I paused. We stood for about a minute, I'd say. The stairwell was a site of some chaos. All the way up to the sixteenth floor, I'd witness ongoing episodes in the drama of a mother whose two year-old boy was trapped in one of the elevators, with his baby sitter. The last I saw, a handyman and the mother were trying to pry open the elevator door at the sixteenth floor. You may be sure that I counted my blessings. Coming home ten minutes sooner, I'd have been in there with the kid, but I don't want to go there.

My near neighbor and I climbed another two flights, and then paused again. That was our pace.  As we approached the fourteenth floor, she graciously  asked if I wanted some water. If I'd felt the least bit unsteady, I'd have accepted, but I declined with thanks. My heart was pounding, but not scarily, and I didn't feel any particular discomfort. I soldiered on up the four remaining flights in a single go.

The first thing I did after I'd let myself in was to strip down and jump in the shower. There was still plenty of it; we weren't fifteen minutes into the blackout. The water in tall buildings is supplied by wooden water tanks situated on the roof. The tanks in turn are supplied by pumps in the basement. The pumps go out in a blackout, of course, but it takes a while for the tank to empty. In addition to the shower, I filled the pasta pentola, just to have water for cleaning my hands. By the time I gathered up all the stuff that I thought I'd need and taken a seat on the balcony - I didn't want to heat up the cool rooms with my presence, and, besides, I can't stand still air - I was soaking again.

I was still shaking too badly to dial the one phone that still worked. With the cell phone, dialing wasn't the problem; the overloaded circuits were. At 4:30, I heard a news report on WINS about the blackout. I was delighted to learn that only a small part of the city was affected. By now, I could see that the traffic signal at 87th and First was working, but I assumed that that was backup power. I finally made contact with Kathleen, who was of course unaffected, although she told me that she'd noticed a surge in the power a while back. We agreed to talk in an hour. I went back inside for something, and saw immediately that the power had come back on.

I took another shower. 

Posted by pourover at 10:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I present to you the world's first Bear Angertwink. Father Tony - call home!

Posted by pourover at 09:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

A week ago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art held a "members' preview" at the Roof Garden. I asked (among others) LXIV, who said that he couldn't go that night but we happy to go on a Friday evening, when the Museum is normally open late. That sounded good, and we agreed to meet on Friday, at six. Before heading up to the roof, we took in a couple of special exhibitions, including the strange Clark Brothers show, about which more in a moment.

We stepped out onto the terrace atop the Museum at just the right time: the line for the bar was only a few people long. By the time we were served, the line stretched back for quite a long distance. We would discover a similar line at the other bar. What slowed things down, certainly, was the martinis, even though they'd been pre-mixed. But by the time we left, near eight o'clock, I wondered if the official occupancy capacity had been reached. That we were standing about eight floors up, overlooking one of the finest views that New York has to offer, beneath a suggestive evening sky - none of that meant anything to the people at the cocktail party on the roof, all standing in little knots talking to one another just as they would in some dark club. It would appear that the Roof Garden is the happy hour destination for every Upper East Sider without a weekend place. That was LXIV's opinion, anyway.

Stephen (1882-1960) and (Robert) Sterling Clark (1877-1956) were two of four brothers who inherited an immense Singer Sewing Machine fortune. Stephen was active at the MoMA, while Sterling, fearful of nuclear attack, situated his collection out of harm's way in Williamstown, Massachusetts. They seem to have thought little of each other's collection of Impressionist and Early Modern painting, although they both liked Renoir. An exhibit of pictures and other works from their collections is on view in the André Meyer Galleries at the Met. It's very odd. The regular André Meyer Collection has been shipped off somewhere else. The special exhibition space at the southwest corner of the building has been closed off. I wish they'd tell us about these things ahead of time. It's very upsetting to have the André Meyer Galleries in disorder, even if they're far from my favorite part of the Museum.

Posted by pourover at 12:00 AM | Permalink

Courage has never been a virtue that I thought I possessed, much to my chagrin. But maybe I'm a little more courageous than I thought. Earl Shorris is certainly right in this: being courageous improves all the other virtues that you might have.

Sometimes, yes, I've learned, it's important just to soldier on even through the worst anxieties. "Anxieties." Did anyone with real courage ever use that word?

¶ Earl Shorris on The National Character, in Harper's.

Posted by pourover at 12:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

As everyone knows, the Standard & Poor's 500 Index - known familiarly as the S&P 500 - celebrated its fiftieth anniversary recently. The birthday fell in March, and the celebration fell last night, at the Metropolitan Club. About three hundred financial types gathered to hear what a panel of index experts had to say, mostly about the past and present and, wisely, very little about the future. Ringers included at least two parents, which just goes to show that you're never too old for a school play, especially when the other kids on stage include John C Bogle, the founder of Vanguard, Yale economist Robert J Shiller, Times financial columnist Floyd Norris, and S&P indexer-in-chief David Blitzer.

And at least one spouse. That would be me.

Where to go for dinner after the reception? I suggested La Goulue, which was more or less around the corner, even though we didn't have a reservation. Amazingly, they seated us after the briefest of waits, during which we loitered by moviemaking trailers parked in the street. After dinner, I made bold to ask a passing professional about the project. All I can tell you is that Sigourney Weaver is in it.

There was a question about noise. Kathleen thought that La Goulue might be too loud for her parents. So we ran a sound check before we were seated. It was much too noisy from any objective standpoint, but it was not too noisy for my mother-in-law, nor for my father-in-law. Both were fascinated, in the original sense of the word, by the restaurant's Paris-in-New York rumble. Think Le Grand Colbert (Something's Gotta Give), but with more din. Great food, though.

Since Kathleen is essentially remarkable, I can't say that she said anything unusual in the panel discussion. She doesn't dazzle, but she does something much nicer. I would tell you what that is but she has trademarked the name and she doesn't license it. Her parents, who heard nothing but warm and glowing appraisals of their daughter from everyone they talked to at the reception, could not have been prouder.

Posted by pourover at 11:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Doubtless I ought to be happier about New York Mayor Michael R Bloomberg's departure from the Republican fold in what many observers regard as the run-up to a presidential candidacy. I do believe that Mr Bloomberg would make a Great American President. He's very good at getting a grip on problems and convincing everyone that they must be dealt with. On the constructive side, his record is less impressive, but he seems to know when to give up on unpopular (bad) ideas. And there is a strange modesty to the man, an instinctive dislike of hot air. Which is all that his attention-hogging predecessor has to offer, in my humble opinion.

But the doctor tells me that I've got a serious Vitamin B-12 deficiency, even though I swallow an enormous B-complex horsepill every day. I'm scheduled for an injection at one-thirty.

Posted by pourover at 10:49 AM | Permalink

Sad to say, this is my favorite picture of me. I am so blasted. About a drink away from blacking out. But I am happy and easy. I am in my off-campus apartment at some point during the third year of law school. There is a party underway, although nothing big. Why I am wearing a windbreaker in my own house is something that only alcohol might explain. If you didn't know better, you'd take me for a shallow frat boy. (Sigh.) How nice it would have been to be the surprising frat boy who turns out not to be shallow. Alas, I overshot.

Can someone tell me: is that a "popped collar" that I'm wearing? Or just a mess? I went to school too early for jargon and theory. I do know that the windbreaker was commissioned by a coal company that my father's operation bought sometime in the Seventies. The seal is obscured by the turned-back front. It was called the Youghiogheny and Ohio coal company. Pronounced (according to Dad) Yahkah-gayny. "Youghio" is obviously the aboriginal form of "Ohio." Have you ever heard "Ohio" spoken by a Frenchman? It's "O-yo." How cool is that?

I thought it was very cool because having lived in Texas was a blight that it would take years to overcome or outlive, whichever came first. For just seven years I'd lived in Houston, but you'd think! "So you're from Texas?" people would say. It was wrong on so many levels, even though it was right, technically.

About the fingernail: the previous summer, when I was in New Hampshire clerking for my uncle (great forbearance on his part!), I slammed a car door on my finger. That took a long time to outlive, too. I'd have completely forgotten the colossal suffering that I felt for a few hours in the summer of 1979 if it were not for this souvenir.

Posted by pourover at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

In celebration of the good news this morning, I'm going fishing. Catch you later.

Posted by pourover at 10:09 AM | Permalink

At the moment, I can't do the experience justice. Spending the midnight hour, two nights in a row, in a midtown conference room with Kathleen, while she participated in the morning sessions of an ETF conference held at the Marriott in Kuala Lumpur, wasn't rest-oriented. It was cool, though.

There were a few technical problems the first night, which was a last-minute affair. I had dinner with her beforehand and then walked her back to the office, where neither of us knew what to expect. Kathleen was assured that the head of IT would be there with her for the forty-five minute speech that she had been asked to deliver on the second night, which was set up the moment the KL people heard that Kathleen wouldn't be able to come in person. I was planning to stay home - until I heard from Kathleen that the head of IT had had a personal emergency and wouldn't be able to be on hand. I hopped in a taxi and was at her office within twelve minutes.

Eleven o'clock - the scheduled time - came and went without the teleconference call's coming through. Not to worry; they were running late in Malaysia. In fact, they had just broken up for a tea break. A lawyer who chatted with Kathleen while we waited told us that, at tea breaks in KL, "copious amounts of food" are de rigueur.

A bit before 12:30 AM our time, Kathleen was re-introduced to the conference (about three hundred people). We got home a little over an hour later. I did not go right to bed.

Posted by pourover at 11:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

As it happens, Joe and I live in the same New York State Assembly district (the 65th). Yesterday, I asked Joe whom he'd be voting for in the special election triggered by the elevation, if that's what it is, of the longtime incumbent, Pete Grannis, to the Department of Environmental Conservation. Joe thanked me for reminding him of the election, and said that he'd be voting for the gay candidate. I voted for the Democratic candidate. And our man won, Micah Z Kellner.

Mr Kellner is 28. It was perhaps premature, and definitely fatuous, of him to crow, "I think it's clear people understood that I've been fighting hard for this community for a long time." I wish him well, though, as I'm sure does Joe.

I got to the polls at about three in the afternoon. "What's the turnout been like?" I asked. I was told that I was the forty-sixth voter to use the voting machine. There are several polling places within the district, each of which has a number of machines. But I would venture that hundreds if not thousands of people would be using that machine if everybody turned out to vote.

Posted by pourover at 10:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The other day, Jason Kottke posted an entry about the word "embiggen," calling it a "cromulent" word.

I had to look up "cromulent." I don't remember what it means, but I know that it comes from The Simpsons, a show that, like almost all televised entertainment, I have never seen.

The Simpsons challenges my sense of humor. I know that it's supposed to be funny, but I disapprove, massively. I am a complete prune on the subject of The Simpsons. Never having seen the show, I don't know what it is that I disapprove of, but that's not important. As my mother once said, when all my sister and I were doing was burning incense, "I'd know the smell of marijuana anywhere!"

As far as I'm concerned, the only constructive thing that the Federal Communications Commission could conceivably do would be to stop television altogether. That's right - no more TV for anybody! Given my draconian perspective, I didn't really give a damn about the Second Circuit's rejection of an FCC ban on "vulgar" language. The deck on the Times story, though, was amusing. "If Bush Can Blurt Curse, So Can Network TV."

When I got up this morning, the cable service was out. When I tried to place a call on the cell phone, the screen told me that I had an "unregistered SIM card." Both problems have been cleared up. The cable service came back on after a while, and rebooting the phone (if that's the way to put it) cleared up the registration problem. But I'm feeling a bit fragile.

To put it another way, I'm in no mood for cromulence.

Posted by pourover at 12:14 PM | Permalink

Had I not fallen apart last week, there would be nothing to read here today. I'd have posted an entry over the weekend announcing a few days' hiatus, while I visited a friend in the country and took a break from blogging. Kathleen, meanwhile, would have arrived at Kuala Lumpur by now. But on Friday morning, the alarmed internist advised against any travel for either of us.

Yesterday morning, I woke as bright as a morning glory. Paging through the Times, I was almost alarmed by the number of interesting stories that I might comment on. This morning, considerably wearier, I looked through the same section in vain. Most of the exciting pieces had so completely lost their lustre that I passed over them all unawares. The few that I recognized no longer promised to yield interesting commentary.

Such swings sound a lot like the shift from mania to depression. But in my case they happen very quickly and, in retrospect, are fully explicable in terms of fatigue. The sad fact is that, instead of taking it easy over the weekend, I not only tidied up the household but dealt, as I wrote yesterday, with numerous "messes" - piles of books, piles of mail, tote bags full of who-knows-what, and other litter. These messes accumulate because - that's right! - I'm usually too tired to deal with them. Keeping up with what I want to do each day is hard enough.

If only someone would customize David Allen's Getting Things Done for me. The hardest thing about all of this is wrestling with the moral question. To what extent am I responsible for being a better manager of my own resources? How expert am I supposed to be about pacing myself when all the evidence suggests that I can't trust my own feelings. My warning systems, if you will, don't work, if they're in place at all. Is that my fault, or just the way I'm made?

Although not at my best this morning, I'm far from last week's worst. I've got enough spunk to be angry about the Supreme Court's Ledbetter decision last week, which, as dissenter Ruth Bader Ginsburg complained, overlooked the fact that most employees are in no position to know whether they're being discriminated against when it comes to paychecks. The majority is re-imposing the pro-business formalism that emasculated so much progressive legislation at the end of the Nineteenth Century. It's appalling! But I've got enough spunk, too, not to mistake the decision for the end of the world. I'm tired, but I'm not that tired.

Posted by pourover at 12:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The building's air conditioning came back on last night, but until then the blue room*, with its new window unit, was the place to be. So I tackled a lot of messes, mostly by exporting them to other parts of the apartment. Among the things I had to deal with was a colorful South American tote bag that held a miscellany of photograph albums. One of the handles had finally unraveled completely, so the bag had to go. In the process of clearing it out, the snapshot above fluttered to the ground.

Lord! I thought. All that hair is so hot! And not in the good sense of "hot." And so red! I've grown very fond of my silvery grey hair. I'm in every way more comfortable with myself today than I was when the picture was taken (believe me!). Youth is so totally wasted on the young.

The lady in the picture is, of course, Miss G. Isn't she cute? She's even cuter now.

* The blue room is our apartment's second bedroom, which I use as a library/writing room. It has been painted some shade of blue for the entirety of our twenty-four year occupancy.

Posted by pourover at 12:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Many thanks to everyone who has worried about me. I'm immensely moved - and that's why the concern can stop. If I were really disturbed, I wouldn't care. And for a few hours yesterday morning, I didn't care. But I see now that not caring was a sound response to a bad circumstance. The hurling myself in front of a train part wasn't sound, I admit. But the shut-down was very wise. It was, after all, a shut-down that concentrated not on local subway stops but on getting to the therapist's at 12:30.

The fractious computer didn't bother me for the usual reasons - I want my MTV! - but for my own. Introducing long and, occasionally, thoughtful essays with short and punchy lead-ins on the blog has become What I Do. And let me tell you: spending most of your free time on a learning curve in your late fifties is not something that I recommend to anybody. It's Arctic. Almost everybody you talk to is half your age. Or - and this is a compliment to you, bub (meaning me) - gay* Or gay and half your age.

Anyway, I got caught. The a/c was out and my computer wasn't working, and now I'm not going to Connecticut for a week of R and R and Kathleen's not going to Kuala Lumpur for some important career development. There was a time when I'd have wondered if I'd stage-managed things to keep Kathleen from traveling, but I know that we're not there anymore. I just broke down: heat and Microsoft are the culprits. Or rather, my fatigue after whistling in the dark for over a year.

The phone rings. It's nearly one in the morning. It's Kuala Lumpur. What if they teleconference Kathleen?

That is so wow.

*And wonders about you. As if you hadn't.

Posted by pourover at 12:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The complex personality that is me seems to be falling apart.

Yesterday morning, I was happy enough when I awoke. But the computer had shut down again during the night sua sponte. And there was the threat of unpleasantly warm weather. Something snapped. I wasn't just put out. In fact, I never even raised my voice in protest. I just dreamed of throwing myself in front of a subway train. It was the opposite of anger. I wasn't bustling with outraged emotion. I didn't feel anything. The meanings in my life had all been effaced.

Not erased, as I first thought. Meaning revived as the day went on (thanks hugely to Jane Gardam, by the way), and I began to care again. But now, about to go to bed, I feel the emptiness of the recovery more than the recovery itself. If "life had no meaning," I wouldn't, obviously, be writing here, and I'm writing here with a passion. But the rest of life, the life that I live among other corporeal beings - all right, bodies - that's hard to take. Why do I take up so much space, and why, despite so much evidence to the contrary, do I feel that nobody wants to be anywhere near me? 

We all know that I'm massively overtired, trying to do at fifty-nine what I barely carried off at thirty-five, and failing. But I'm going to the doctor this morning anyway, just in case there's something organically wrong. (My therapist wondered if I mightn't have had a small stroke.) It throws everything up in the air - Kathleen's trip to Kuala Lumpur, my time-out in Connecticut. I'm on something like a suicide watch.

Thanks for reading. I mean it.

Posted by pourover at 01:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

I spent last evening in a warm, Francophone hum. First, I watched Arsène Lupin. Then I read Le Prix de l'Argent, the latest installation - and a half-installation at that, to be continued, if you please! - of Largo Winch's adventures. (Well, it's not the latest, I see. It was,  though, when I put it in my shopping basket!) The two pastimes went together very well.

Jean-Paul Salomé's 2004 adaptation of the Arsène Lupin stories was never released in the United States, and therefore no DVD was produced for the North American Region. Having finally purchased a DVD player that reads discs from all regions, however, I can now order DVDs directly from France - or from anywhere! - as long as I want to watch them in the bedroom, which is where the special player is installed. Even before I hooked up the new machine, I had a few DVDs that wouldn't play on a regular American player. Le chat, for instance. I have no idea why this classic study of marital discord, starring Jean Gabin and Simone Signoret, has not been reissued by the Criterion Collection, much less overlooked entirely. I bought a copy of Keeping Mum while it was still in the American theatres - what a moron. Had I but waited... And there's a Spanish film in the new-disc basket that I don't even remember ordering. You know how that is.

But Arsène Lupin justifies the new DVD machine as no other movie could. I can understand why it was not released here, even though it stars Romain Duris, Kristen Scott Thomas, and Eva Green. It is a very good film, of its type, but that's the problem. The type that it belongs to could best/most misleadingly be described as "Gallic Indiana Jones." You're right: at the end of the day, "Gallic Indiana Jones" just does not compute. It will take me weeks to be more articulate, but for the moment I'll just say that Arsène Lupin is, from an American marketing perspective, toxically melodramatic. (You'll find something about Arsène Lupin here.)

And then there are the subtitles.

There are subtitles.

But they are in French. In French only. Thank heaven! Because I would never have been able to follow the story without French subtitles. I'm not entirely sure that, even with their help, I did follow the story. But I think I did. Let me tell you: it was GREAT FUN to watch Kristen Scott Thomas underplay a semi-supernatural villainess out of Edward Gorey. If nothing else, Arsène Lupin taught me that Ms Scott Thomas was put on this earth to enact all the great Gorey roles, even if, being for women, they are rather brief. But La chauve-souris dorée - how magnificent she'd be! And the original Gorey title is already in French! (It means - and, really, the humor of the thing totally hangs from the difference between the music of the French title and the brutal English - "The Gilded Bat." There's something about that "Bat" that's like an insect smashed on a windshield.)

And yes, I did say "underplay." The lady is exquisite.

Monsieur Duris, on the other hand, rivals Johnny Depp for swashbuckling, although he is not the least little bit camp. This movie was made before his "breakthrough" (I'm not sure that it was), De battre mon coeur s'est arrêté, but it's an enormous vote of confidence, and he tackles the part with the self-assurance of Cary Grant. Eva Green, who stole my eyes, if not my heart, in Casino Royale, gets to play the innocent girl, and, being Eva Green, that means that she makes innocence interesting.

A costume historian would have a field day attacking the outfits. The gowns are almost willfully anachronistic. Ms Scott Thomas's character appears to favor 1910 for daytime wear and 1885 for the evenings. Major hoot. You think the French don't know what they're doing? About couture?

As for Largo Winch - the wonderful thing is that I can really read Largo Winch now. Only rarely do I have to look anything up, and even then I don't, really; I've caught the sense. This evening, I had to look up "comparaître" and "surenchérir," among a very few other words. For those of you who've never heard of this series of bandes dessinées - comic books for grownups - Largo Winch is a hunky blond who inherits a vast conglomerate, which he thereupon tries to run on idealistic lines, while treating décolletée ladies with the most thoroughgoing chivalry. On one level, it's Playboy fantasy. That is, not only are the babes stacked, but the "article" is worth reading! On another level, the series idealizes a certain fantasy of American life. Creators Jean van Hamme (writer) and Philippe Francg (drawings)* have clearly expensed a lot of quality time on this side of the pond, looking and listening, and the Largo Winch series almost reads like an American cartoon that has been translated into French. In that sense, the series is the complete opposite of Arsène Lupin. In the end, though, only a French (all right, Belgian) writer would come up with the hero's totally super name. Largo Winch! Is that studly or what? The one invention that I can find in these books is the headquarters of Group W, a tower on Central Park West, next to the Dakota. Everything else is scrupulous. Le Prix de l'Argent, for example, will tell you what the Waldorf-Astoria looks like, and how far it is from the Helmsley Building at the bottom of Park Avenue. Better than a photograph, I assure you!

In Le Prix de l'Argent - the story is completed in La Loi du Dollar - Largo is upset to find out that a subsidiary of a subsidiary of a subsidiary in his vast holdings has fired all its employees and moved its operations to the Czech Republic. How could this happen? Cooked books and stock options, of course! I expect that many Continental readers will pick up the ABCs of executive enrichment from this book's very plausible plot. There's lots of action along the way, because - did I forget to say this? - Largo Winch went to the James Bond School of Management. He is forever being shot at and handcuffed. I know; I said "Playboy fantasy." I meant - and what's probably the selfsame thing - "B School fantasy." If only quarterly meetings were like this!

* I probably have these accreditations completely backward. Pardon!

Posted by pourover at 12:00 AM | Permalink

UPDATE: I am immesely proud to be part of this picture. It's the first collective photograph that I've ever belonged to with my heart and soul.

For some time, I've had plans to get together with the Ganome when he came to New York for the GB:NYC4 meetup on Bear/Blogger Hill in Central Park. In other words, today. The Ganome called just before noon, from the Port Authority. We agreed to meet at the Met, which is, among other things, not too far from Central Park, being in it. He arrived with his boss, the Butter Monkey. The Monkey is a few years younger than the Ganome (ie our children's age), but smart as a whip and extremely pleasant to talk to.

When we'd finished our lunch, I asked my friends if there was anything that they wanted to see in the museum before heading out, because I could probably take them straight to it. I am so abominably conceited about my familiarity with the museum's layout. But I didn't get to show off today, because what they really wanted was directions to the Sheep's Meadow. I was only too happy to walk them there. I didn't yet know where Bear/Blogger Hill is, because I hadn't planned to attend one of Joe's weekly retreats. But I know how to get to the Sheep's Meadow, and we walked all the way round it - a complete circuit! - before finding that the Hill is very near the Naumberg Bandshell, which we'd passed earlier. But we did find it. I was privileged to introduce the Ganome and the Monkey to Joe. I met a few people and nodded to a few others whom I'd seen at other gatherings, but, having just met the Ganome and the Monkey and gotten to know something about them in person, I wasn't taking in much new information. One of the farmboyz took a picture of the group while I was there, and I'm in it, I suppose.

For the most part, I watched the rollerbladers at the base of the hill. There were very gifted dancers, such as Disco Grandma, who performed as if they were Olympians on the ice. There were character dancers, like Bladey, wearing loud costumes (I got to see Bladey's arrival on his clownish bicycle, announced by its throaty klaxon). There was a wonderfully chunky middle-aged woman who had no moves at all. She just huffed her way up the gentle slope and stood still on her skates coming down the other side. My favorite act was Bottle. Bottle is a very graceful and well-built black man who, in addition to his skates, wears only a pair of very exotic harem pants and two wristbands. He's called Bottle because he likes to glide along with a liter of bottled water standing on his head, but unattached to it in any way. If he could find a more artistic vessel, he would look like something out of the old Ballets-Russes. He and Bladey danced together a few times, side by side. I applauded a few times, although that generally wasn't done.

So there I was in Central Park on a Saturday afternoon, surrounded by interesting guys and overlooking an appealing spectacle. The weather was perhaps a trifle warm, but there was a lovely breeze, and I was comfortable enough.

At about four-thirty, I said goodbye to all and went to catch the Third Avenue bus. As packed as the Park was, the Upper East Side was empty. Neutroned! We've entered the Hamptons season. 

Posted by pourover at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Things aren't going well up here in Yorkville. A phone message that I never heard was thrust in my face. People who probably don't mean it hurt me big time. I'm angry and lost, and, if it weren't for Kathleen, I'd also be stupid. But Kathleen is in my life because I knew that she would understand everything that I'm up against, and I was right. Kathleen rocks/rules.  

Which is another way of saying that, even though I'm a man who has loved his wife without incident for over twenty-five years, I do not have the gift of friendship. I don't, actually, have any friends at all.

Well, I have Fossil Darling, with whom I was thrown into a room by a prep school in 1963. But FD is famous for forgiving everybody. One of these days, he is simply not going to forgive me for the terrible things that I say to him, and then I'll be Tilt.

But here I am, about to be sixty, with no friends. Which is to say that there are two. Everybody else is a friend of Kathleen's. (And I love Kathleen's friends.) There's George and there's Susan. Well, of course there's Fossil Darling, but he's the guy I got stuck with in boarding school, n'est-ce pas, as am I for him.

Enough about my arid landscape. You have more friends than I do and I advise you to treasure them. Make sure you understand why you like them. And don't get mixed up with couples - never, ever, short-circuit your relationships. You can't like two different people in a way that each would like, so give up in advance.

Find your friends, and, if necessary, ditch your responsibilities. God knows I'd have liked to.

Posted by pourover at 01:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

This evening, battling flattening fatigue (I had to pry Kathleen from her fleece nap blanket at five-thirty in the afternoon), we very irresponsibly took a taxi all the way down to Chelsea for a housewarming. Our friend, Rob, moved into his studio in January, but almost immediately went on one of his South American junkets, including a quick trip to Antarctica, and didn't even start to unpack until about a month ago. The apartment has great views of the towers of Wall Street. Five floors higher, the building's roof offered even better views, and in three hundred sixty degrees. The weather was perfect, and we wished that we'd brought our cameras. The Razr, trust me, didn't do the views justice.

That was cool. But what was really cool was meeting a movie star. Okay, maybe not a star star. But a very nice guy, the Uruguayan actor Marcos Cohen, who landed an interesting small part in Robert De Niro's The Good Shepherd, the Guatemalan planter, Dr Ibanez. You will recall that Dr Ibanez's plantation is devastated by CIA-launched beetles in order to punish the man for his independent stance. Marcos was still buzzing from having landed the part, which made him big news in his native country. Kathleen asked him about working with Mr De Niro, and Marcos's answer was very positive, although he did say that the famous actor is "shy."

Kathleen also wanted me to tell you how great Rob's studio is. And it is great, so far. He has painted the main room almost exactly the same deep blue shade that gave our blue room its name in 1983, and his foyer, in a tribute to our apartment, is painted teal (although we're closer to evergreen). The only thing that remains is to furnish the place. We advised Rob to start off with the purchase of a good comfortable upholstered armchair.

After the party, we even more irresponsibly took a taxi to the Brasserie. We will never get over the original Brasserie, but it must be acknowledged that the current incarnation offers truly excellent frites. Kathleen discovered this at a recent birthday lunch. I only wish that I could have eaten them all. But the accompanying burger was enormous.

Here's hoping that you had a nice weekend, too.

Posted by pourover at 10:17 PM | Permalink

Last night, I took the 6 Train down to Bleecker Street. It was a beautiful evening, clear and just cool enough for a windbreaker. I love coming out of the subway at the corner of Houston and Lafayette Streets - it's so far from the Upper East Side where I live. Why, there's even a gas station! Walking down Lafayette Street, I can see the old police headquarters and the federal courthouse. At Prince Street, I turn left, and it's just a few steps to McNally Robinson, the lovely independent bookseller. I feel miles from home, but I've only walked, in total, three blocks.

Gary Shteyngart's Absurdistan has just come out in paper, and he and his Random House editor, Daniel Menaker, had an open conversation about their working relationship in McR Café, at the east end of the bookshop. We learned Mr Shteyngart's daily routine. He is served breakfast in bed at about eleven. Then he boots up his laptop and - still in bed - writes until four, when he heads uptown for an hour of shrinkage. Then he gets together with friends and drinks to excess. One day a week, he substitutes teaching a creative writing class at Columbia for the shrinkage. (At least one of his students had come downtown for the event.) We learned that the writer went to college at what he called the Oberlin Institute for Special People. We learned that New York is really the only place where Mr Shteyngart does not feel that people are trying to kill him. At a recent reading in Houston, for example, the audience was very frosty about his take, in Absurdistan, on Halliburton, which is called "Golly Burton" by the novel's more ambitious prostitutes. Might Mr Shteyngart have chosen to provoke the irritation of Houston? Mr Menaker surmised as much.

Gary Shteyngart is a very funny guy - funnier in person, if you ask me, than he is on the page - and I advise you to seek him out if he comes to your town. Do not try to kill him.

Oh, almost forgot: the next book. We learned that Mr Shteyngart's next novel will be set in New York City. That's the good news. The bad news is that almost everyone will be illiterate, confined to grunts and gestures. And some people will be immortal. Sounds like great satire.

***

Come to think of it, I went to an event at McNally Robinson last week, too. Then it was to see Alain de Botton, whose The Architecture of Happiness has recently appeared. Instead of reading from his book, Mr de Botton gave a PowerPoint presentation of most of the illustrations in his book. Speaking with easy wit, he summarized the major points of the book so well that, when I looked at it later, I found much of the material to be familiar. The author was a delight to listen to. Relaxed, unflappable, he shared his interest in and thoughts about architecture with such a casual air that no points were driven home. Like all of Mr de Botton's book, The Architecture of Happiness has one main purpose: to coax you into paying attention to the world around you. While he spoke, I couldn't help looking past him, out the bookshop's windows, at Old St Patrick's, the first Roman Catholic cathedral in New York. Unlike most cathedrals, it is tucked away on side streets, and it is certainly smaller than most cathedrals. But it's a vital monument to the determination of a widely-despised faith to build a diocese in hostile territory. One has only to compare it to the cathedral in Baltimore (Maryland was initially a Catholic colony) to grasp the relative poverty of diocesan coffers in the early Nineteenth Century. I wondered what Mr de Botton would have made of it; I'm not sure that he even knew that it was there, standing behind him.

Posted by pourover at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

This afternoon, I had occasion to try out the new parking thingies. Once upon a time, there were meters. You put in quarters and turned a dial to the desired amount of time, and it was that simple. Now it's even simpler. You stick your card in a slot, press a button to reach the desired amount of time, and voilà, your card is ejected and a slip of paper pops out of the machine. You place this scrap on your dashboard. The maximum extent is an hour - two dollars.

Then we went to lunch at Jacques. I spilled an almost untouched martini. Lunch went uphill from there, and we were back at the car in plenty of time.

Now I know how New York works! Another anxiety overcome.

Posted by pourover at 03:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

At about six o'clock yesterday evening, I received an email from a friend who is closing off one Web log and setting up another. He had a few things on his mind, but even before I got past his second sentence, I decided to write back to say that I would have to wait to answer his letter until tomorrow - today - because I was "off to the theatre." The moment I wrote that, I felt a little chill. So often, it seems, I have only to announce plans in a letter or an entry for the plans to fall apart.

It was only after I'd gotten dressed for the evening that I rooted out the tickets in the ticket drawer. The ticket drawer is a bordel at the moment, but I found what I was looking for: two seats at MTC for Blackbird. Because of that chill that I'd felt before dressing, I forced myself to search out the date. And the date was not yesterday's date. It was next Wednesday's date.

Kathleen, who had taken an unscheduled day off - she had finished one of many projects and decided to celebrate by doing something about her exhaustion (ie, sleeping), was delighted. She had not started to get dressed. I got back into regular clothes as quickly as I could and was soon back in my chair, reading Robert Stone's A Hall of Mirrors. I suppose I ought to have gone to my desk and read my friend's email, but I somehow shared Kathleen's sense of reprieve. A night off!

I don't feel as foolish as I might. Assiduous readers will recall the night last August when I thought we had tickets for The Drowsy Chaperone. It was only when I got to the seats and found them occupied that I checked my dates. I was a week early then, too - so much better than a week late. That was the night that I surprised Kathleen by a) not having a fit and b) insisting that we check out nearby theatres. We ended up laughing the evening away at Avenue Q.

Posted by pourover at 10:29 AM | Permalink

Les cérises sont très beau, non?

Les cérises sont très beaux, oui?

Les cérises sont très belles, oui?

Je ne suis pas Énarque, non?

Posted by pourover at 01:20 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

Les cérises sont très belles, oui?

After lunch, I went for a walk in Carl Schurz Park. Every year, I hope to get at least one really good photograph of the cherry blossoms, and I must say that I'm content with the photograph above, at least at full size.

I entered the Park at Gracie Mansion. Here we see a corner of the reception hall, which was built not too long ago, and the more recent brick wall, a sterling improvement over the cheap wooden palings that used to assure mayoral privacy. (Mayor Bloomberg, of course, has a much nicer townhouse in a ZIP Code to the south, and does not live here. Neither did Rudy Giuliani, after he screwed up his marriage to Donna Hanover.)

Here is a very poor photograph of one of the Park's most curious features, the circular cul de sac with a statue of Peter Pan in the center. I'm not even sure that it's Peter Pan, but I do know that some local kids uprooted it ten odd years ago and managed to haul it up to the John Finley Walk, from which they tossed it into the East River. Divers (FDNY? NYPD?) retrieved the statue; don't ask me how they saw what they were doing. I read not long ago that the East River is so long and capacious that it is not flushed clean by the tides. Instead, it just gets dirtier. A cheering thought.

On the John Finley Walk, some gentlemen were having a conversation at the top of their voices. That didn't bother the occupants of the squad car nearby though. Squad car? WTF! I made bold to ask the officer in the passenger seat what he was doing there. My I'm-not-really-as-big-as-I-look act must have worked, because he answered very cordially that "We're here!" Then he admitted that he's not with the local precinct. Heaven knows what they're looking for. Terrorists mining the FDR Drive? Phantom fellucas?

At the big-dog run, I followed the antics of this tongue-lolling pup, who loped around the enclosure like the adolescent goofball that he obviously was.

Finally the cherries. I know of nothing more opulent in nature than these feathery pink clouds.

Under the allée.

Posted by pourover at 04:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I have lived in Manhattan for the past twenty-seven years. I was born on the West Side and I grew up in Westchester. Aside from a Texas exile between two stints at Notre Dame, and a misguided - in retrospect - experiment in Litchfield County living - I have spent my life here. But every so often, New York feels like a place I've just arrived in. Early this afternoon, I had one of those "I'm in New York" moments.

Then again, it may just have been spring fever.

Posted by pourover at 06:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

On Tuesday afternoon, I got up from the computer, left the blue room where I spend my days, and turned on Radio RJ. It was time to do something about the kitchen closet.

The kitchen closet is not in the kitchen, largely because the kitchen is a closet, almost (I've certainly been in larger closets). The kitchen closet is on the other side of the entrance hall, or "foyer" as entrance halls are called for some very strange reason. It is actually half of a clothes closet. We keep winter coats and light bulbs in the other half.

I wouldn't dream of publishing a photograph, even if I could take an intelligible one. But this story isn't about the kitchen closet. It's about how I felt the energy to clean it out. After a year or more of staying out of the kitchen as much as possible, I've let most of what's stocked in the kitchen closet get too old to use. I may continue to stay out of the kitchen as much as possible, but at least I'm storing much less garbage. I threw away old nuts, pasta, grains, crackers, and - five fruit cakes. I was able to distinguish the most recent fruit cake, received this past holiday season. I opened it up and enjoyed a slice. It tasted very good. I will enjoy the rest of it in coming weeks. Next year, I might even put the fruit cake in the kitchen when (and if) it arrives - and not in the kitchen closet.

A few exotic bottled sauces got the heave-ho, too. I have become a very unadventurous eater.

The music was glorious. Among the bigger pieces were the "Rach III," Schubert's Ninth, and Vivaldi's Nisi Dominus, furiously sung by Nathalie Stutzmann. Also lovely to hear was Fauré's Masques et bergamasques. It was warm enough to crack the balcony door.

Cleaning the kitchen closet was something of a holiday. How weird is that?

I know that kitchen closets are a dreary topic. But I'm sure you'd much rather read about that than hear about my exciting time at the dentist's yesterday afternoon.

Posted by pourover at 09:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Having survived my bout with dentistry yesterday, I was consumed by a need - to go to the movies! Specifically, to go to see Paul Verhoeven's Black Book, which is playing at Lincoln Square. The film got an exceedingly snarky review in yesterday's Times. But I still wanted to see it, partly because Sebastian Koch, one of the stars of Das Leben des Anderen, is in it. I noted that, in a trilingual movie, Mr Koch spoke only German. (He spoke a little English, but no Nederlands.)

Going to the movies early on a weekday night was interesting - there was an audience! I came close to being unable to join it. I blithely took a taxi over to the West Side. It was only as I approached the box office that I examined the contents of my wallet: $22. How did that happen? It was enough to buy a ticket, and, more importantly, a tub of popcorn and a soda. But it meant that I'd be going home on mass transit.

Mass transit - hmmm. A taxi is so much nicer when you're going home! After the movie (which is, indeed, a tiny bit cartoonish, but very taut and exciting; plus, Carice van Houten, the star of the show, channels the platinum blonde of the Thirties with astonishing acuity) I called Kathleen, but she was already in her pyjamas. She said to ask the doorman to pay the taxi fare, on the understanding that I'd repay him in the morning. In my view, that's something that ladies can get away with far more easily then galoots the likes of me. Then I called Fossil Darling, because I was right outside his building. But he didn't answer. I figured that he'd already gone to bed (he was visiting neighbors, he tells me this morning).

So I took the 1 train and the M86 bus home. Ho. Hum.  

Don't miss Ralph Blumenthal's story, "Unusual Allies in a Legal Battle Over Texas Drivers' Gun Rights." The liberal/conservative polarity doesn't work in the context of this issue. The fight is, rather, lawful vs free (a/k/a "lawless").

Posted by pourover at 11:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In an hour, I'll be at the dentist's. A tooth at the back of my mouth has crumbled. Fortunately, I've felt no real pain, although my tongue is unhappy - the tooth has become rough rubble. It's a new experience, this falling apart of a tooth. The novelties of growing old are not amusing.

I had lunch with my friend Nom de Plume. We hadn't seen each other in a few weeks and we had much to catch up on, despite email and IM. We could have talked for another hour, easily. But we'll talk again; nobody's going anywhere.

The skies are grey and wet today. It rains in every season of New York's year, but spring rain is different (perhaps we New Yorkers are different). There's a gentle quality to spring rain that makes it welcome even when a gust of wind blows raindrops on your neck.

If I were to bottle my idea of New York City, it would be called "Rainy Spring." There's something about standing at a corner, waiting for the light to change, and watching a little Mississippi course by below the kerb on its way to the nearest drain that always makes me feel that the city is all mine. That this is where I'm from in every sense of the word. Even though, to my undying disgrace, I grew up in the suburbs (albeit the closest one in), and then had to live in Houston for a spell.

Well, of course I didn't have to live in Houston. I just lacked the gumption to make my own way in the world.

Rain is very forgiving, did you notice? And I forgot to tell you: I am going somewhere: Kuala Lumpur at the end of May!

Posted by pourover at 02:16 PM | Permalink

Yesterday was pretty raw at first, dark and grey, but in the late afternoon the sun came out and I went for a walk. The forsythia was in bloom. Forsythia always looks best from a distance, as a vague yellow cloud. Up close, it becomes very unruly. I don't think that there's a flowering plant that looks more normal to me. When I was growing up in Westchester, it was everywhere.

I sat on the Finley Walk by the River and read two essays of Montaigne, "On liars" and "That no man should be called happy until after his death." Ovid, Lucretius, Macrobius, and Seneca are quoted in the latter. It was the quotations that wowed me when I was a boy. Imagine having all of that Latin verse on the tip of your tongue! The beauty of Montaigne's essays is that the quotations don't seem pedantic at all. They are pearls of granite wisdom, authoritative in their antique concision. In Montaigne's day, it was by no means taken for granted that contemporaries would ever write literature to rival that of the ancients. French, Italian, Spanish, English, German and the other languages of Europe were "vulgar tongues," unsuitable for serious thoughts. (Montaigne plays with this idea in every essay: writing in French, he rarely fails to announce the casual nature of what he's doing.) It was possible to be a learned man in the Sixteenth Century. There weren't that many ancient books to get through. There were very few unimportant books.

I wonder what Montaigne would have made of the East River, which, being a strait, flows sometimes north and sometimes south. When I got up to leave, the river and sky shared a rose complexion.

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I'm probably crazy, but I feel a change in my bones: I am ready to keep a neat and tidy freezer. A freezer with plenty of empty space. A freezer so orderly that I don't even half to open the door to see what's inside.

But I'm not there yet.

¶ My Freezer: the Dream.

Posted by pourover at 03:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Louis XVI, Benedict XVI... can we arrange a switch? Louis was actually a good old boy who was true, in his way, to his school. Benedict is not so worthy.

Posted by pourover at 12:00 AM | Permalink

What I'm reading these days is Virgin Soil, Ivan Turgenev's last novel, and A Hall of Mirrors, Robert Stone's first. They are very unalike. Turgenev's social comedy - which, I expect, is not going to be so funny by the end - is dry and understated, prone to refrain from judgment while making it impossible for the reader to do the same. His characters are offspring, legitimate or otherwise, of the upper classes; some are richer than others but all would pass, in the England of the time, as gentlefolk.

A Hall of Miirrors takes place in a New Orleans that is unlikely to inspire nostalgia. For the down-and-out characters whose alternate stories twine through the opening of the book, New Orleans is anything but the Big Easy. It's a gritty, unwelcoming burg at the end of the Illinois Central tracks. Rheinhardt, now a drunk, was at one time a promising clarinetist at Juilliard. Geraldine's face is nastily scarred - car accident, she says. She'd like to get a job as a waitress, but prospective employers have another line of work in mind.

Somewhere in Virgin Soil - I haven't come upon it yet - a character gives the aristocracy another thirty years. In the event, they had forty, which is close enough. Everybody in the book seems to believe that some sort of fundamental change is inevitable; something like a revolution lies ahead. In A Hall of Mirrors, the revolution has already taken place. The air giddy expectation that colors Virgin Soil are replaced by the shut-down self-protectiveness of A Hall of Mirrors.

Continue reading "Taking Stock: Reading Turgenev and Stone" »

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A gloomy day was yesterday, but I had a nice walk just the same, and, what's more, I needed it. More at Taking Stock.

Posted by pourover at 12:00 AM | Permalink

It's nearly two, and I've just come back from breakfast across the street, where we watched stragglers from the St Patrick's Day parade drift down 86th Street. The parade terminates at Lexington Avenue these days, not Second, so we're spared most of the drunks and detritus, not to mention the motor coaches and traffic barriers. Kathleen will give me an eyewitness account of the moraine when she gets to the office. When we parted after breakfast, she headed for the bank and the subway, right in the thick of things.

Ordinarily, I'd be dusting and vacuuming and listening to one of Bach's Passions, but I'm feeling sheepish about not having seen the Eric Rohmer film, L'amour l'après-midi, known here as Chloe in the Afternoon. The movie that I saw yesterday, Chris Rock's I Think I Love My Wife, is said to be a remake. I don't know why I've seen none of Mr Rohmer's films aside from L'anglaise et le duc, but I've not always been as enthusiastic about French movies as I am now. In any case, that's what I'm about to do - see L'amour l'après-midi.

***

Watching L'amour l'après-midi, a grave, talky, but extremely interior film, I wondered how it had ever held the interest of a brash American comedian, much less inspired him to remake it as a comedy. And what a fascinating remake I Love My Wife is! If you set aside the interpolations that make it funny, the newer picture is remarkably faithful to the original in terms of scenes, sequence, visual details, and, not least of all, dénouement. But the result of this fidelity is to emphasize the vast difference between the respective protagonists' romantic adventures, as well as the gulf between French cinematic sensibility thirty-five years ago and its American counterpart today.

Another puzzle: what would I have thought of L'amour l'après-midi if I hadn't seen I Think I Love My Wife?

Posted by pourover at 01:12 PM | Permalink

Today, we celebrate International Progress Day, although not very internationally, because the pun doesn't work in other languages. Happy International Progress Day!

In the event, I did not ask Colm Tóibín to say his name. While he signed the book, I suggested that The Master could be seen as a short-story collection, and I told him that the James work that it most reminded me of was The Awkward Age. Mr Tóibín graciously assented to both remarks. I looked at his signature. It was almost perfectly legible.

The reading at 192 Books was my sole Saturday-evening entertainment. Kathleen could not rouse herself to leave the apartment, so we missed the Scissors Sisters concert. I wasn't about to go to that by myself! Readings given by writers I admire are much more my thing, even if the event requires a fifty-minute commute each way. (Tenth and 21st is a long way from 86th and Second, with at least one train change.)

I'm especially glad that I didn't miss Mr Tóibín. Something about his writing - or perhaps it was his soulful author photographs on dust jackets - led me to expect a dour, shy Irishman. Wrong! He was so charming and conversational that it actually hurt to turn away from him after the signing. I'd have given anything for an hour's conversation - a feeling I've never had before. He recommended that we all read Hemingway's "The Killers," in case we hadn't. He talked about how his new collection of short stories, Mothers and Sons, came to be, and revealed fascinating details of the backgrounds of a couple of the tales. More about that tomorrow.

Like a dodo, I left this week's Book Review at the bookshop. I was so involved with tying my scarf and turning the mobile back on that I abandoned it atop a stack of books, where, to be sure, it fit right in. The thought of having to buy another newspaper just to replace it was almost as irritating as not having anything to read on the voyage home. (I did have Mr Tóibín's book, but I'd read it, and it's really not suited to the MTA's clatter.)  I resolved to be resourceful. I'd haunt little room where the service elevator stops. That's where we do our recycling and leave our newspapers. Sure enough, I had a replacement by noon. 

Yesterday's burst of spring has drifted off, leaving wintry conditions in possession.

Posted by pourover at 04:05 PM | Permalink

Gawd! It's spring! No scarf, no gloves - even my jacket seems a little heavy. On the whole, I'm sanguine about ageing. I know that I'm much happier and more centered now than I was whenever those waning faculties and interests were pulsing. Maybe because they're not. But one thing hasn't changed. I still contract rabid spring fever at the first meteorological enticement. My first thought: I want to take the day off! Just goof around. There are plenty of second and third thoughts, and presently order is restored. (Just what would "taking the day off" mean? Insofar as martinis were not involved, that is.) I will do the usual Saturday cleanup, changing the sheets and - by the way, there are no more handkerchiefs in the drawer, so would you please wake up and wash them? Tonight is beyond crazy. Seven o'clock: Colm Tóibín at 192 Books. Then the Scissors Sisters at Madison Square Garden, a venue of which I am innocent. Long story there. I asked the man at 192 when I was at the shop the other day for Jane Smiley if he knew how the Irish author pronounces his name. I plan to ask the man himself tonight. I'm finding it awkward to say "Col'm ToyBEAN."

Kathleen was too tired to go to the museum last night to hear the MMArtists play Brahms (it was wondrous; report on Tuesday). We did have dinner afterward around the corner, but what she did during the concert was watch The Last Waltz. This morning, she insisted that I see Joni Mitchell sing "Coyote." I love the song - I love Hejira, the album that it opens. But I was amazed by the singer's resemblance to, of all people, Katharine Hepburn. They're peas out of a pod! And when you think about it...

My heart broke a few minutes ago, because "Blarg Noir" left me on the cutting-room floor.

Don't mind me - it's spring fever.

Posted by pourover at 11:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

It seems that I haven't said much about last Saturday's Blarg Hop. That's because I was too busy incapacitating myself on Sunday (ably guarded by Fossil Darling and LXIV), and too incapacitated on Monday, to write more than a couple of sentences. I was so pleased with myself for my good behavior on Saturday night that I could do nothing all day Sunday - and I do mean all day - but drink martinis. Shaken, stirred, whatever.

Continue reading "Taking Stock: The Blarg Hop" »

Posted by pourover at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The Daily Blague is hardly the most confessional of Web logs, but I've always wanted to let readers have some sense of what my life is like. At the same time, I don't ordinarily find it difficult to be discreet. I've little inclination to write about things that can't be written about.

Kathleen's job change has been an exception. For quite some time, the two of us have wondered if and where Kathleen might find a partnership at a law firm capable of sustaining her growing practice. Moving from one law firm to another is an incredibly delicate process, but I have to say that Kathleen had an easy time of it. It could have been vastly disagreeable.

But from the inside, it has been wearying. There is the secrecy, which isn't really in our natures. (For a long time, we told no one.) There is the prospect, followed by the reality, of leaving a partnership of which Kathleen is very fond, and at which she has spent many happy (if overtired) years. Finally, there is the recognition that, after a certain age, change is almost as taxing as it might be beneficial, at least while it's ongoing.

I don't know how I should have endured the suspense and the anxiety - anxiety about Kathleen's getting enough sleep - if I hadn't had this blog to keep me busy. At the same time, I'm amazed that I was able to focus on it, and with an increasingly stable lens. I won't say that I've written bright and cheerful pieces while in the grip of black doubt - contrary to the expectations of friends and relations, it was never a foregone conclusion that Kathleen would find what she needed - but I have learned to work as hard as I can whenever it is possible to imagine being bright and cheerful. I have developed an almost grim attachment to the weekly Book Review review, even though it always feels like a new kind of hangover on Monday mornings.

I can take it.

Well, I wouldn't go that far. I've been very cranky, which wasn't exactly helpful to Kathleen, because I'm too profoundly bourgeois to adapt to uncertainty. As if she had nothing else to do, Kathleen has had to buoy up my spirits from time to time, and she has always done so with the bold assertion that, as SPDR Woman of Wall Street (which she really is), she would make something happen. At a minimum, this has reminded me that I have a page to write - I have to make something happen.

PS: Almost everyone, including lawyers familiar with Kathleen's practice who ought to have known better, has expressed the hope that Kathleen would be able to take some time off between jobs. If only. In fact, nothing could be harder to swing right now than a vacation, even a short one. This happens to be the busiest time of the year for Kathleen.

Posted by pourover at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Last night, at the Blarg Hop, I was a complete gent, and home in bed long before midnight (actually, I watched Rififfi for the first time - fantastic - that long, quiet heist scene is amazing!). Today, however, I went fishing with Fossil Darling and LXIV. I was in bed even earlier. Much earlier.

Posted by pourover at 11:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

When Kathleen told Dr A (her fantastic therapist) that Miss G would be bringing home a boyfriend, for the very first time, for dinner on Sunday, Dr A had Dr A-worthy advice.

She said: "The whole point of the first meeting is to have a second meeting."

That is so effing true. Just staying friendly enough to see one another again really is the outcome every sane potential father-in-law ought to have in mind. And thanks to a message on the machine that talks about getting together soon, I think we achieved the objective. 

There are drawbacks. My mother-in-law, who takes her inspiration from Lady Bracknell, was quite upset that Kathleen couldn't tell her either The Beau's age or the name of his alma mater. "What do you mean, you didn't ask?" she railed. Kathleen, armed with Dr A's fortitude, bore the contumely in patience. I was spared. Sort of. Ms NOLA and M le Neveu were delighted to learn that we plan to have them on hand when next we next meet Ms G and The Beau. "You're going about this all wrong," said M le Neveu. How, I asked. "Because they'll tell us." he larked.

You have options in this life. You can feel empty about the meaningless of existence. Or you can have babies whose diapers need to be changed. One of the great things that happened during my lifetime, unquestionably, was that men took up changing the diapers. That's why I'm still here.

Posted by pourover at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

New York, New York: what a contradictory town. Elsewhere, the driven snow stays pure until it melts. Here, it takes on a color not found in nature: the color of carbon emissions.

;

How nice, during a storm, to have street sheds to walk under. They're protection against debris that might fall during the repointing of the city's apartment buildings' trillions of bricks. Melting snow, however, turns them into erratic showerheads. Having taken the picture of the filthy snow, I had to dodge the droplets.

;

Walking out of Barnes & Noble, which I visited for another pair of reading glasses but where I ended up buying three terrific but quite unnecessary books, I decided to take a walk down to the river, to see which way it was flowing. It felt miraculous to be alive in New York City, just a few blocks from the East River (which is not a river but a strait - hence the change in the direction of the flow). The end of February is hardly spring, but there was a caressing mildness in the air that made staying outdoors seem like a good idea - not a statement that could have been made during the past weeks.

;

It was great fun to watch the dogs in the big-dog run. Antics galore. I also enjoyed the grandparent's pleasure of not having to take care of any of them. I moved on to what in a few months will be a hypnotic view. Stay tuned.

Better yet, visit Carl Schurz Park. Just take the Lex to 86th Street and head downhill. Don't hesitate to ask directions; you may very well find that you're asking me, as I'm on my way, in the other direction, to the Museum.

Posted by pourover at 03:56 PM | Permalink

It's so bitterly cold outside that I "forgot" about going to the movies this morning until I'd missed all the first showings. I almost went to see Breach, at 1:50, but at the last minute I did not feel like dragging myself to 72nd and Third. Too far! Then I asked Fossil Darling if he'd see Avenue Montaigne with me at 5:50, but he has out-of-town guests. So I have resolved to stay home and master, for once and for all, the dispute between the Guelphs and the Ghibellines.

Posted by pourover at 01:56 PM | Permalink

In a phone conversation last Sunday, Miss G all but blurted out that when she came to dinner the following weekend, she would be bringing "someone." I was told the young man's name, and then, almost as an afterthought, his dietary preferences (happily identical to M le Neveu's). That was it. A name and a steak.

Today, I received a note from Miss G, retailing a few welcome basics, facts that will make it unnecessary to appear to grill our guest on Sunday. Questions such as "Where are you from?" "What do you do?" will not have to be asked. Everyone assures me that these things just come up on their own, but I don't have to count on that unlikelihood anymore. There was also a snapshot. I'd love to post it, but I'll have to ask permission for that, and permission will have to be asked in person. Let's just say that I've got two great smiles beaming out at me from a silver frame on my desk.

Man, am I happy!

Posted by pourover at 12:30 PM | Permalink

Finally, it's snowing. Since I don't have to leave the house, shovel a sidewalk, or drive a car, I'm quite content. I can enjoy snow the way children do. What I love most about snowfall is the deep quiet. Even in Manhattan, noises are hushed. Only the occasional gust of wind makes a sound.

Continue reading "Let It Snow" »

Posted by pourover at 01:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

My friend, Diana Bradshaw, and I usually give each other lunch at home, on a rotating basis. It was my turn today, but there was no way that I could whip up anything smart at home, so I took us to the Café d'Alsace, where we both had croque monsieur. It was Diana's first. When we ordered, the waiter rather witlessly asked if we wanted to share one croque, and Diana was immediately concerned that there would be too much food on her plate. In the event, there was, but she took home the half sandwich that she couldn't eat, having delighted in the other. A gentle warm-up in the oven will bring what she took home right back to its creamy crunchiness.

And that would have been it for my day out. I came home and sat down to write. For one reason or another, writing did not go well. I wrote up a book so peremptorily that I was done in fewer than three paragraphs. I turned to another book, with better results. But when a friend reported a crisis, I insisted that she come for tea. I made a new batch of my ragù while we talked it over. By the time she left, I was in a thoroughly gregarious frame of mind.

So, even though I was "too sick" last night to go to Carnegie Hall to hear glorious Orpheus - featured tenor Ian Bostridge canceled due to illness, so I thought I might as well do the same - I dashed down to NoLITa for another reading at McNally Robinson Booksellers. Ms NOLA had dropped word of the event while I was struggling with one of my books, and almost anything, even braving the arctic cold, seemed preferable to struggling in front of the machine. It turned worth the trip to hear Olaf Olafsson talk about his new collection of stories, Valentines. I wished I'd looked as good as he does when I was his age - forty four.

Ordinarily, I'd have come straight home. Ms NOLA told me that she was going to "dash home" the minute the reading was over. But Kathleen complicated things a bit by insisting that I call her when the reading was over; perhaps we could get together for dinner. Okay - but where? Neither one of us knows NoLITa. In fact, we're aware of exactly three restaurants south of Fourteenth Street. I knew that Balthazar was not far from the bookshop, but there's always a crowd, and it's fairly grand for a routine weeknight dinner. Ms NOLA agreed to walk me there while she brainstormed about alternatives. Unfortunately, I obstinately walked us in the wrong direction, east instead of west, so that by the time we actually got to Balthazar I was perfectly happy with a forty-five minute wait, as long as I could stay warm.

I was exploiting Ms NOLA shamelessly. She was going to be the other half of my party of two until Kathleen arrived. But by the time Kathleen arrived - long after Ms NOLA and I had been seated; long before the duration of forty-five minutes - Ms NOLA had gently put the question of what I wanted her to do when Kathleen arrived. Exploitation was neither thinkable nor desirable. I asked the waiter to ask the maître d' if the table next to us, which was being cleared, could be held for a "friend" who would be joining us. When someone from the front of the house came to deal with my request, I updated my "friend" to my "wife." We were moved a few tables toward the center of the room, to a genuine table for four. Staff couldn't have been nicer.

I love Balthazar. The food is fine - the best steak-frites in New York -  but I could care less about that. I love the big, bustling room, because it's also the warmest busy restaurant that I've ever been to, warmer even than the Grand Colbert in Paris. French or not - and the waiters are wonderfully sérieux - it's Manhattan in its wildest dreams. Everyone, even the toughened regulars clustered at the bar, is faintly surprised that the scene is really happening.

The funniest thing was the view in the mirror. I was a pink and white head in a sea of tan and dark. There was no one in the room with remotely the same complexion. I still felt right at home.

Posted by pourover at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

For over a week, I've been beset by two illnesses. A nasty cold morphed into something more gastro-enterological. Much discomfort, but nothing next to the plague of unknown spam that has created an uproar at my Web host. Don't ask me to explain, because it has something to do with MovableType and it can't just be MovableType because in that case I'd be reading about the scourge on blog after blog. Fortunately, I've found someone to give me a hand, but as I still don't really understand what the problem is, or how it happens, I'm far from content.

What I'm taking stock of this week, then, is my own vulnerability to maladies, corporeal and virtual. I don't really know which is worse. The physical illness is obviously more unpleasant, but the digital problems interfere with what I now regard as my professional life. Frankly, I'd rather have the intestinal cramps.

Light posting, at any rate, must be understood in these terms. I'm reluctant to write my customary swathes of prose if I can't promptly upload them. Lucky you.

Posted by pourover at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Every now and then, the dishwasher is empty when one of my dinner parties begins.* We're talking blue moons here. My Miele dishwasher, which I love, is set to run a perhaps needlessly thorough cycle that takes nearly two hours to complete. I cannot operate it at the same time as any other high-amp appliance, such as the water kettle or the microwave. This means that, in order to use them, I have to pull the dishwasher open. Quite often, I forget to close it again, and the dishes drip midcycle for a while. As a rule, when one of my dinner parties begins, the dishwasher is stuffed with bowls and utensils that I've used to make dinner, and I've just turned it on. And just because the dishwasher is full of pots and pans doesn't mean that the stove and kitchen counter aren't as well.

That's why, when I clear the table between courses (often just an entree and dessert), I take the plates out onto the balcony, where they usually sit until the next day. Here's how I clean up after a dinner party.

When everyone has gone, if I still have the energy, I empty the dishwasher (which would be easy enough if it didn't involve putting everything away), and fill it up with whatever's dirty in the kitchen. If there is any extra room, I clear as glasses and the dessert plates as the kitchen stuff leaves room for. I turn the dishwasher on and tidy up the kitchen. Then I go to bed.

The next morning, I empty the dishwasher and clear whatever's left on the table. Only when the dining area has been completely straightened up do I bring in whatever's out on the balcony. If I've had a big dinner, with more courses or more guests, the dishes from the balcony will fill the third load to run after the dinner.**

In a nutshell, my cleanup begins near the dishwasher and works outward. I must confess that the process can take several days. I've got a blog to write!

* For quite some time now, my only dinner guests have been Ms NOLA and M le Neveu, but I hope to broaden my reach in 2007. We did have Fossil Darling and LXIV last Sunday.

** Silver is washed by hand, as are certain fancy plates that I don't use too often. I also hand-wash what's left of my mother's wedding crystal. I think we've broken two stems over the years, which is amazing.

Posted by pourover at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

This idea of taking stock on Thursdays is all very well, but it's the entry that drives me crazy week after week. Reviewing the Book Review can be like pulling teeth, but at least I know what I'm supposed to be doing. I had absolutely nothing even to work with - no, that's not true, but you don't want to know how desperately unattractive my fallback was - until I passed a few minutes at Sale Bête, where Édouard had just posted a nice new piece and, helpfully for me, some photographs. Dont celle-ci:

 If this is not a Roman Catholic church, I'll be very surprised. It bears the unmistakable stamp of a Catholic church in New England, striving with its pointed Gothic windows and doorways to remind the working-class parishioners of the glories of the True Faith - and to substitute a little pizzaz for the rectangular formality of the Meeting House. The façade is Orvieto in yellow-painted pine. and the squat tower a campanile, not a spire. There is also the fact - fact! and known to Édouard I'm sure - that no pristine Congregational church would be interfered with by so many power lines. There is, finally, the stunning lack of verdure. Well, at this time of year, of sere branches.

Besides, Édouard goes on to tell us that he attended a celebration of the Epiphany here. With clowns. Case closed.

Connecticut and Rhode Island (the church is in Westerly, Rhode Island) are home to arguably the largest population descended from immigrants from Portugal, Italy, and Quebec in the United States. I used to wonder how people from sunny Mediterreanea could survive in dour New England, but then I remembered Homer, and the fact that "sunny" is a recent innovation in those old countries. Life is hard everywhere, and, on balance, not quite so hard here, where there's no class structure.

Or where the class structure is elastic. Because there certainly is a class structure. Looking at this church, I feel once again the terrible shame that I would feel at prep school when I went down to Blairstown for Mass at the pathetic little church at the wrong end end of town and sat through imprecations hurled out by the wild Irish priest who'd have been happier as a Baptist, had he but known that. Or the church that I'd attend (rarely) with my aunt and uncle, in New Hampshire - the church from which my uncle was buried two years ago. What were they thinking, trying to do Gothic with planks of wood? Trying to imitate the glories of the Quattrocento in chromolithograph terms? These churches are temples of hideosity.

I suspect that everybody knows this, and that it doesn't matter.

It didn't, ultimately, matter to me. I never believed. I comb through my earliest memories, and I can remember not a single second in which, say, I hoped that my prayer would reach the Blessed Virgin Mary, or understood that Jesus was the Son of God. I think that, when I was a small child, I expected that I would eventually understand virgin birth and redemption; I'm quite sure that I wasn't a little critical thinker. But I was a born materialist, and revelation never came. There are so many things about life that I don't understand. Religion and sports would be at the top of the list, if I cared very much about either.

Posted by pourover at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

If I'm not mistaken, this item is called a "canterbury." The prototype was designed to make it easier to transport large music scores from the episcopal library to the cathedral. Now canterburies are mostly used to hold magazines. That's certainly what this one is going to be doing. It's a lot bigger than I expected it to be. The side panel comes up to my knee, and the handle reaches about six inches higher than that.

If could sit still in a quiet room - indefinitely, which Pascal assures me I cannot - I could read all the magazines in the canterbury. My brain might liquefy and drip through my nose, but I'd stop feeling guilty about not getting to The Nation every week.

I bought the canterbury from a Levenger sale catalogue, if you're interested.

Posted by pourover at 09:00 AM | Permalink

Last night, I went out for drinks and dinner with friends. It was altogether impromptu. We met at the bar at The Modern, the restaurant attached to the Museum of Modern Art. It is a small, loud, and somewhat amorphous space. I resolved to stick to wine. Unfortunately, I stuck to a lot of wine. The evening was delightful, and I remember every minute of it, but this morning what ailed me felt like nothing less than pancreatitis. (I know about pancreatitis because it is induced by my allergy to a drug that, owing to my not having bothered to request the transfer of medical records, I tried not once but twice.) I couldn't remember the last time I'd felt so awful.

I spent the day in bed, reading Patricia Marx's Him Her Him Again The End of Him. I couldn't read two pages without dropping the book on my chest and falling asleep for a moment. Shortly after five, I picked up the massive collection of Joan Didion's nonfiction that Everyman Library recently published. I read "Goodbye To All That," the valedictory essay with which she bid adieu to her youth and also, as she thought, to the New York in which she had passed it.

There were certain parts of the city which I had to avoid. I could not bear upper Madison Avenue on weekday mornings (this was a particularly inconvenient aversion, since I then lived just fifty or sixty feet east of Madison), because I would see women walking Yorkshire terriers and shopping at Gristede's , and some Veblenesque gorge would rise in my throat. I could not go to Times Square in the afternoon, or to the New York Public Library for any reason whatsoever. One day I could not go into a Schrafft's; the next day it would be Bonwit Teller.

I know what she means. And then, as I'm sure Ms Didion found out, living in the City again, you get over the disappointment of realizing that even Shangri-La can be repetitious and predictable. You forgive that. It's not hard, because you are no longer young, and no longer teasing dreams out of stone.

Posted by pourover at 06:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

No more walking sticks!

How'd I forget to mention that last week? I've stopped carrying a walking stick. I don't remember when I began taking a walking stick with me whenever I left the building, but it was more than five years ago. The stick was very reassuring, because I was afraid of tripping on uneven pavement. I felt very weak and vulnerable for a few years; in fact, I was sick with osteoarthritis. I didn't know that until the symptoms were relieved by Remicade, beginning in the spring of 2004. It didn't take long to realize that I no longer had to worry about tripping and didn't need the cane, but by now I had acquired a very beautiful stick from Paris.

When the beautiful stick from Paris snapped in December - a freak accident - I tried using other, shorter sticks that I'd collected, but they seemed more bother than comfort. The last time I used one was on Christmas night.

I will replace the beautiful stick from Paris the next time I'm in beautiful Paris, which doesn't look to be anytime soon. (I don't foresee any travel until Thanksgiving.) But I won't, at least not immediately, go back to carrying a stick whenever I leave the building. It's very inconvenient, you know, to carry a stick. It ties up one hand completely. When it rained, I had no free hands.

At the same time, I still can't quite believe that I'm stickless when I cross Second Avenue. And nobody offers me a seat on the bus or the subway any more (not that I ever accepted). And one of these days I'm going to curse under my breath when I miss an elevator because I didn't have a stick to wave in front of me - sticks are very good for that, now that most elevators are equipped with motion detectors that keep doors open. The trick is to thrust the stick only so far, so that it doesn't batter an unsuspecting passenger.

And here's a Homeland Security question: why would anybody permit a big guy to get on a plane with a long stick of ebony? I'm sure that I could knock somebody out from behind. Maybe even kill! Doesn't get much blunter and simpler. But no - they're worried about gels...

Posted by pourover at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

The exchange of gifts at holidays and birthdays has become a thing of the past in my circle. We are all getting older, and realizing that the future presents problems of deaccessioning. We all buy what we want when we want it, and confine gift-giving to those rare occasions when we're dead certain that the recipient is going to be either very interested or very amused by something.

But with PPOQ there are no rules. I make them up as we go along; then I shred them. You have to understand that my old friend has spent most of his life in a state of low-grade exasperation, brought on by the capricious demands of near and dear ones. At present, sadly, I am the only one en vie. I have to work overtime.

When the four of us - PPOQ, LXIV, Kathleen, and I went to the Metropolitan Museum on Boxing Day, we had lunch, toured a few shows, and then bid farewell at the Gift Shop, which I didn't even think of dragging Kathleen into. I did remember, however, that I'd meant to buy a sale book, an enormous and heavy collection of aerial photographs of Italy. Then I had a brainwave! I'd impudently demand that PPOQ buy it for me, as a birthday present, and - I didn't work this part out right away - do the heavy lifting and bring it to our place.

Well, I never did work out the delivery scheme, and on Saturday night I had to schlep the book from LXIV's to Jules and back home, but as both of those relays were taxi-borne, I cannot really complain about the dislocated shoulder that voyage by subway would have guaranteed.

I've cropped a small part of the photograph on page 259, showing Trinità dei Monti atop the Spanish Steps. It all looks rather small, doesn't it? Delicate and small. The drama of the scene is completely effaced by the aerial angle. At least, I take it to be. I myself have never set foot in Italy. The possibilities of a trip there are so boggling that I can't even think about it. Rome is not even on the list of my top-ten Italian destinations, and neither is Florence. It's the North that I want to see: the Po Valley, the lakes, and the Veneto. (If I were a Northern Italian, I'd be rallying for the Lega Nord and "Padania.")*

For the time being, though, I'm happy to feast on the extravagantly beautiful pictures in Italy From Above (White Star, 2005). Antonio Attini and Marco Bertinetti are the photographers; Alberto Bertolazzi provides the (pretty minimal) text. There's a forward by Giuliano Urbani, and a preface by none other than Franco Zeffirelli. I don't recall how steeply the price of the book had been reduced, but on sale it was no longer an expensive item. Get one while you can! 

And thanks always to Fossil Darling - as I've decided to rechristen PPOQ. Uni - got it? - laterally.

* Regular readers know that, as a New Yorker, I already advocate separate-state status for the Metropolitan Area and its watershed. At a minimum!

Posted by pourover at 12:00 AM | Permalink

If I've had a better birthday, I'll shave off my beard and repent. What a night!

The usual suspects gathered at LXIV's Union Square apartment, where I had to tear myself away, repeatedly, from the window. It was such fun to watch all the passers-by, so different from and more interesting than the folks in Yorkville High Street. PPOQ was already there when we arrived, a tad early - oops. Chivalry forbids me to state just why I thought we were going to be seriously late, but, chronically punctual, I assumed that we wouldn't get to the party in good time, and completely overlooked the dispatch with which the 5 train whisked us to Union Square. "Don't worry," pooh-poohed PPOQ at the door. "He's been ready for hours."

It has been a long time since I've been in a flat as stylish as LXIV's, if, indeed, I've ever been in one. The edible treats were just as sophisticated. I worried at first about saving room for dinner, but then it occurred to me that, as it was my birthday, I could do as I pleased and damn the consequences. As it happened, I wanted very much to keep my head, so although it meant disappointing LXIV, who had looked forward to shaking up a few martinis (which he, however, wouldn't dream of drinking), I stuck to a very nice graves. Ms NOLA and M le Neveu arrived before too long, quickly followed by Miss G, who had been out on the town the night before. She had evidently recovered nicely. Owing to the bizarrely temperate weather, Ms NOLA was able to look fetching in one of those little black dresses that you can't ordinarily wear in January without making everyone around you shiver.

When it came time to head to Jules, the bistro in St Mark's Place, Kathleen and I decided to take a cab while the others chose to walk. Poor PPOQ went home, prudently enough. He wasn't feeling very well, thanks to an office cold that had finally nabbed him, and we all agreed that he'd been very gallant to come downtown at all. I don't know what kind of a time he'd have had at the restaurant. It was very noisy as usual, but he would have found the young men at the table next to ours most interesting. (Trust me; I've been out with him many times, and discretion, at least insofar as sharing his designs with me is concerned, is not his middle name.) They looked too young to have real jobs, but they were all wearing jackets. Miss G found the wearing of jackets on a Saturday night in St Mark's Place highly suspicious, and both she and Ms NOLA, who sat to my right, regarded the "pack" as an all-too-familiar bore. PPOQ, in contrast, might have found an extra seat amongst them, and ventured to offer career counseling.

The traffic on 14th Street was terrible, and the traffic on Second Avenue was unimaginable. Both were clogged by taxis. I realized that I had never been downtown on a Saturday night before. When we finally arrived at the restaurant, I got out my cell phone and started to dial Ms NOLA's number, but she and the others walked in before I could press the Call button.

My dinner was a classic: half a dozen oysters, steak-frites, and crème brulée. I damned the consequences when it came to the wine, and we went through three bottles of Domaine Chèze St Joseph. The waiter actually shook my hand when I signed the receipt.

Miss G took the photos, using my phone. I asked her to take one of the people sitting at the table outside, looking for all the world as if it were May. Because New York comes in two temperatures, cold and please turn on the air-conditioning, I had never noticed that the doorway area at Jules can be cleared out nearly to the dimensions of a garage door.

After dinner, LXIV walked Ms NOLA and M le Neveu back to Union Square, where they all had a drink before the latter two headed back to Park Slope. We walked Miss G around the corner to her apartment and then hopped in a taxi, which sped right up First Avenue to 86th Street and home - where I permitted myself a martini. And so to bed!

Posted by pourover at 12:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

On Tuesday, the last day of Kathleen's winter break, I went over to the West Side to have lunch with her at Café Lalo. Kathleen has spent some pleasant half-hours at this palace of sweets, and she wanted to introduce me to it. When she told me that the tables were "very small," I ought to have known better. Well, I did know better. But I wanted to indulge her, frankly. So even when the tables turned out to be smaller than small, and the menu turned out to be so not a me kind of menu (at least for lunch), I was a good sport and didn't complain. Now I can say that I have done Café Lalo, and henceforth leave it to the high school students who keep it busy in the middle of the day.

This afternoon, I treated myself to a croque monsieur at Restaurant Demarchelier, one of three neighborhood croqueries. I'm fondest of the ones that they serve at Jacques, on 85th Street, but when I was there last week they weren't making croques, for a reason that remained veiled to me despite persistent questions to the waiter. I like Demarchelier very much, but does sit athwart Park and Fifth Avenues, and I'm happier with a slightly scruffier clientele.

Sometimes I'm restless, and I simply have to go out, but it doesn't happen often. Neither today nor two days ago was it the case. What drove me outdoors was a sad truth that has percolated through my dura mater in the two and a half years that I've been reading Édouard's Web log, Sale Bête: I need to get out more. From his lair in the Village, Édouard ranges far and wide, frequently engaging in interstate travel, and he always has his camera handy. I have observed, although not to Édouard himself, yet, that while I always photograph New York scenes from the sidewalk, Édouard shoots from the middle of intersections. I pray that this will not lead to an untimely demise, but it does make for better pictures. Inspired by his example, I took this picture of Demarchelier while standing on the double yellow line in the middle of 86th Street.

Posted by pourover at 03:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

For reasons that I still can't go into (stay tuned!), 2006 was not what I would call a fun year. But progress was made on several fronts, not the least of them my personal appearance. Without trying, I lost fifteen pounds. (There were times when I just went hungry instead of snacking, but even that didn't rise to the level of "trying.") I stopped wearing shorts all the time. (They were nice shorts, and I had them dry-cleaned and pressed, but still...) I discovered that Polo/Ralph Lauren was making the kind of clothes that I wore when I was a teenager, before Houstonian impecuniousness. So I resumed trying to look sharp, in a preppy sort of way. I've never been a slob, but I'd gotten a bit too casual.

And I fell in love with a watch, which I never take off except to shower. And I really don't have to take it off then, either, because it's a Hamilton Khaki Navy Automatic, waterproof to depths of two hundred feet. (Or is it meters? I don't need to know!) When I bought it, I didn't know what "automatic" means, and I was dismayed when the watch stopped working a few days after our return from Puerto Rico, where I bought it. Then I figured it out: there has been a name change. When I was growing up, I was given a "self-winding" watch that had been my grandfather's. (I have it still, but the case is broken in such a way that a band can't be attached. I haven't found a jeweler who can be bothered, in other words.) If I thought that "self-winding" was neat, I regard "automatic" as positively virtuous. In our far more fuel-conscious times, an automatic watch seems absolutely green. Even if it didn't, I'd get a kick out of realizing that the watch is being powered by me. Initially, I wore it just to keep it going. Never in my life have I been a man who wears a watch as a matter of course. My watch was always the first thing to come off, even before a necktie, when I came home from work. No longer. That's why I was so tickled, at Thanksgiving in St Croix, to discover, when I was about to take a shower after a walk along the beach, that I'd acquired a most unexpected tan line.

2006 was also the year of reading glasses. The ophthalmologist wrote a prescription, but told me that 1.75 magnification glasses would work just as well, and Barnes & Noble sells Foster Grants for $15. 

By the end of the year, you see, the Daily Me came in a somewhat different package.

In other developments, I learned that my birth parents were roughly ten years older when I was born than I'd been told they were, decades ago, by my adoptive father. I'd always known that my birth father would be unlikely to be alive, but that small uncertainty was crushed by the news that he'd actually be about 110. Not impossible, but so improbable as not to be worth thinking about. More problematically, my birth mother went from being 77 to being 86. Where to go from here is a question rendered all the more tantalizing by the discovery that my birth father was the divorced father of three children when I was conceived. Did he even know about me? If he didn't, my half-siblings wouldn't - would they? But I'll have more to say about all of this in coming weeks.

Posted by pourover at 12:00 AM | Permalink

Happy New Year! Another decade begins to close.

We had a very tranquil New Year's Eve. The treats came first: icy Moët & Chandon White Star and an ounce of sevruga caviar. We listened to Blossom Dearie's first recording, made fifty-one years ago, when Kathleen was three years old and I was eight. I've known about Blossom Dearie for years, but I haven't really listened to her until recently. One of the songs on the first album that I'd never heard before is called "Comment-allez vous?" Kathleen misheard this as "Come on, tally-hoo!" Ms Dearie seems to go out of her way to sing with an American accent, but the song has a period charm. Once upon a time, it was very sophisticated.

It may have been the last of the sevruga for a while. This Saturday, which will be my fifty-ninth birthday, we're going to see how the American product is doing. It's a lot cheaper, and it's not bad. You may think that caviar is exotic and expensive, and perhaps even repellent (fish eggs!), but I read in the Times yesterday that sixty percent of the world's caviar is consumed in the United States.

For dinner, we had Veal Scallops in Apple Sauce - which has nothing to do with applesauce - and for dessert we had lemons stuffed with sorbet. There is really nothing quite so lemony as this Italian production. We had a very nice wine from Chile that a friend hard brought us, Piedra Feliz I believe it's called. Soft and velvety.

Because it was getting late, I started Radio Days before tackling the dishes. I don't know when we began the tradition of watching this 1987 Woody Allen film on New Year's Eve, but it may have been as long as fifteen years ago. The movie ends on New Year's Eve, 1943 or 1944 (I used to know), shot in what is actually the King Cole Bar in the St Regis Hotel. The St Regis is currently being reconfigured as a condominium, and I wonder what will happen to the bar, with its Maxfield Parrish murals. At dinner, Kathleen and I had tried to figure out the difference between a night club and a cabaret. Without success.

In the morning, I had a nightmare. Kathleen was very angry with me for having had way too much to drink and misbehaved. It was very convincing, and I was horrified. No more of that! Waking up, I woke her up, and begged her to assure me that I'd been dreaming. She was happy to do so. Perhaps she was anticipating breakfast in bed. In any case, you'll be happy to know that the $25 stollen from Eli's was pretty good. 

Posted by pourover at 12:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

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.

Posted by pourover at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

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?

Posted by pourover at 07:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

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.  

Posted by pourover at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

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!

Posted by pourover at 06:57 AM | Permalink

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!

Posted by pourover at 01:36 PM | Permalink

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.

Posted by pourover at 09:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

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.

Posted by pourover at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

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. 

Posted by pourover at 06:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Temporarily, comments have been disabled - by my Web host, not by me. It seems that I've got to take some anti-spam action in order to reactivate comments. Let's hope it doesn't take forever!

Trying to comply with the host's requirements has landed me in the soup. I thought that I might backtrack, but I can't, it seems, and now I'm dependent on the folks in Support at MovableType - very capable (and intelligible) people. That I haven't heard back right away doesn't surprise me; the host appears to have taken pre-emptive action and disabled the comments file on every MT site that it serves. It's annoying to have to think about this stuff, but I'm happy to find that I'm in no hurry to have comments reinstated. Oh, the site ought to work properly! But, to tell you the truth, I prefer private email to public comments. After two years of blogging, and finding out what sort of site I've got, I see that long comment threads are not only unlikely but unwanted. I don't write the kind of entries that stir up a chorus of responses. There are days when I wish that I did. Not days, just moments, when someone else's busy blog has made me a bit envious. The moments pass.

In any case, please feel free to write to me: pourover at mindspring.com. You probably have no idea how welcome your letter will be.

Posted by pourover at 12:39 PM | Permalink

The other day, I went to Laytner's, to buy a shower caddy. You know, one of those doodads that hangs from the shower head and holds the shampoo. Right, as if I needed shampoo.

Anyhoo, at the checkout, I saw this refrigerator magnet and misread it. Wow, I thought, they've put Arianna Stassinipoulos on the icebox!

No, RJ; it says "guy." Not "gay." Down, boy.

So now what do I do with the stupid magnet?

Posted by pourover at 08:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Yippee! It's a quarter past eight, and Kathleen's on her way home!

Returning last night from a weekend conference in Phoenix, Kathleen was on Mountain Time this morning. I couldn't rouse her. Eventually, she came to at eleven, claiming that she hadn't heard my play Ella Fitzgerald's recording of "Guys and Dolls" at a healthy volume. I suspect that she will not be able to stay up for a video, which is a shame, because Scoop just arrived, and if you think that Scarlett Johannson was good in Match Point, wait till you see her second Woody.

I've grown up a lot this year. I bought a reasonably serious (mid-three-figures) self-winding automatic watch that I never take off except to bathe. I sent most of my Bermuda shorts to Goodwill and never wear the ones that I kept outside of the building except in extremely warm weather. (I don't even wear them at home unless I'm doing something manual, such as wielding a feather-duster.) I don't roll my shirtsleeves up anymore. But I cannot make use of my Filofax. To be sure, I only got it out of envy. I didn't even get it myself, actually; I got Kathleen to give it to me for my birthday two years ago. She has one. PPOQ has one (and is so ostentatious about it!) For a while, I tried printing up things on special Filofax paper, but it's a headache. So the thing just sat there, indignantly indigo. Finally, my shame generated an idea. I would use the Filofax as a "project organizer" for my Web sites. Instead of keeping all that information - books to write up, long-term projects (the Ishiguro re-read, for example) - on clever computer pages, something I'm equally bad at, I would write it all down with a pencil in the Filofax. The calendar would be a log of upcoming posts. I would even simulate "creative meetings" by doodling on blank pages. It all sounded terribly thrilling.

Of course, I did nothing right away. That would have been rash. Stuff piled up around the writing table: I'm working on this, I'm working on that, what the hell are these papers? THROW THE DAMNED BOOK REVIEW AWAY! It was last Sunday's mammoth Book Review that finally prompted action. To work with it, I had to clear the table, littering the rest of the room with inscrutable piles. These will now be organized and deposited - somewhere, but not at my desk. I will count on the Filofax to remind me of matters outstanding!

Do you smell electrical fire? Cerebral RAM getting toasted?

What to do, for example, with the Playbill for History Boys? We saw the show in August. I was taking the month off, so I didn't write anything about it soon enough to be fresh. Then I told myself that I'd see the movie, which, most remarkably, stars the very same people! I'm going to keep the Playbill, of course; I keep 'em all. But does it have to be out? Is it a work-in-progress thingy? No it is not, I decide. I'll write about it when the DVD comes out, unless the film, which I plan to see tomorrow (join me at Lincoln Square at 11:05 if you're interested), turns out to be awful, which I certainly don't expect it to be.

So, pardon me now while I do inventory.

Posted by pourover at 08:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

If you have read The Eustace Diamonds, the second of Anthony Trollope's Palliser novels, then you'll have waded through Mr Dove's opinion on paraphernalia. You'll have learned that "paraphernalia," far from meaning "stuff," describes the property that a widow can hold on to as her own after her husband's death. The central plot point of the novel is whether, indeed, the eponymous diamonds are paraphernalia, and therefore no-better-than-she-should-be Lizzie Eustace's property to dispose of as she will, or whether they're heirlooms, personal property that must be returned to the family of her late husband, Sir Florian. Mr Dove is of the opinion that the diamonds are heirlooms, and it is well-known that Trollope secured a genuine opinion on the matter from a genuine barrister, his friend Charles Merewether. The first time I read The Eustace Diamonds, I was thrilled by the absolute pedantry of Mr Dove's opinion. Many of my classmates went to law school because they wanted to be Perry Mason. I wanted to be Thomas Dove.

Mr Thomas Dove, familiarly known among club-men, attorney's clerks, and, perhaps even among judges when very far from their seats of judgment, as Turtle Dove, was a counsel learned in the law. He was a counsel so learned in the law, that there was no question within the limits of an attorney's capability of putting to him, that he could not answer with the aid of his books. And when he had once give an opinion, all Westminster could not move him from it, - nor could Chancery Lane and Lincoln's Inn and the Temple added to Westminster. When Mr Dove had once been positive, no man on earth was more positive,. It behoved him, therefore, to be right when he was positive; and though, whether wrong or right, he was equally stubborn, it must be acknowledged that he was seldom proved to be wrong. Consequently the attorney's believed in him, and he prospered. He was a thin man, over fifty years of age, very full of scorn and wrath, impatient of a fool, and thinking most men to be fools; afraid of nothing on earth - and, so his enemies said, of nothing elsewhere; eaten up by conceit; fond of law, but fonder, perhaps, of dominion; soft as milk to those who acknowledged his power, but a tyrant to all who contested it; conscientious, thoughtful, sarcastic, bright-witted, and laborious. He was a man who never spared himself. If he had a case in hand, though the interest to himself in it was almost nothing, he would rob himself of rest for a week should a point arise which required such labour. It was the theory of Mr Dove's life that he would never be beaten. Perhaps it was some fear in this respect that had kept him from Parliament and confined him to the courts and the company of attorneys. He was, in truth, a married man with a family; but they who knew him as the terror of opponents and as the divulger of legal opinion, heard nothing of his wife and children. He kept all such matters quite to himself, and was not given to much social intercourse with those among whom his work lay. Out at Streatham, where he lived, Mrs Dove probably had her circle of acquaintance; - but Mr Dove's domestic life and his forensic life were kept quite separate.*

When I got out of law school, my record was so mediocre that, far from being put on the Dove-track at, say, Sullivan & Cromwell, the best job that I could find was that of a paralegal clerk in the Enforcement Division of the New York Stock Exchange. (I would get a decent job out of it eventually.) When I look at the picture below, taken while I served in that position, from the very partition of my non-cubicle, I suppose that I can see that those whose day jobs involved sizing up legal talent could tell that, while I might possess a few of Mr Dove's talents, I altogether lacked the crucial ones.  

Continue reading "Paraphernalia" »

Posted by pourover at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Instead of writing the Book Review review, I'm staring at the Estée Lauder ad on the back cover of last week's Sunday Times Magazine. "Home For the Holidays," it says, over the brand name, right across the red-and-black (-green?) hostess skirt that Gwyneth Paltrow is wearing. She has also got on a somewhat elaborate but basically mannish white blouse, and she's carrying an impossible bundle of holly - her hand would be cut to ribbons if it weren't for serious floristic intervention. Mostly, however (reading, contrary to what Lisa Carol Fremont has to say in Rear Window, from bottom to top), Gwyneth Paltrow is wearing her dazzling smile, open face, and cascading blonde hair. The photograph would be terminally WASP if one didn't recall her assertion that, through her father, the late television producer, Bruce Paltrow, she comes from a long line of Lithuanian rabbis. It is a pity that Saul Bellow did not live to deal with this phenomenon, this Lithuanian/shiksa Gwyneth.

My Gwyneth Paltrow problem is totally geeky. I've dreamed that I could somehow, notwithstanding my - well, why don't we just stop at "age" - notwithstanding my age, that I could really interest the lady and get her to want to know me better. I buried this longing during the Brad Pitt period - Gwyneth was not worthy. Now that she's the mother of two, you'd think she be even less, er, interesting, but she's not. I have a hot desire to find out what her repartee is like, and to see where repartee might lead. One of the nice things, though, about being as old as her late father (if not older) is that my fear that I would fail to hold her attention is almost overwhelmed by the fear that she would fail to hold mine.

And where would all of this go, in an "ideal world"? Let's say that Gwyneth and I "made a connection" over cocktails at - well, not the Royalton, but somewhere like that. What then? I happen to adore my wife. I adore Gwyneth Paltrow, too, but, gee, not quite so much. It would seem that my interest is basically - and basely - conquistadorial. I want to be able to say, at least to myself, that - &c.

In the end, I'm shot by a twisty stroke of vanity. I reflect that my daughter is as good looking as Gwyneth Paltrow, if not in quite the same photogenic way. But then, all too evidently, neither was Ms Paltrow's mother, the beautiful Blythe Danner, who was never exploited by a major perfumer. No matter how you cut it, life just isn't fair.

Posted by pourover at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

If I hate to wait, it's not mere impatience to have what I want when I want it. It's a long experience of things going awry during the waiting period, or turning out to be all wrong when the waiting is over. The longer the wait, the greater the chance someone will change his mind, or run out of funding, or move to California. The refrigerator will fit in the kitchen, but you won't be able to get it in there without taking the door down. Or somebody may simply find out that what you're up to is adverse to his interest, or at least come to think so. Your supporters may have a change of heart. The plane might crash. All you can do is sit there and wait

I spent hours of my childhood standing on sidewalks in front of schools, libraries, drugstores and other rendezvous, waiting for my mother to pick me up. She tended toward unapologetic lateness. As I got older, I would walk home myself from wherever it was, but I wasn't the least lazy child in history, and it took me a long time to expect that my mother would be late. That's because I erase the particulars of such passively dull unpleasantness the minute it's over. I'll be frantic, for example, while I wait to hear that Kathleen's plane has landed, but as soon as I hear her voice announcing the fact, the misery evaporates without a trace. Instead of expecting my mother to be late, I expected to find out that she had abandoned me. I don't want turn up the pathos or sound like Jane Eyre, but I knew that my mother was unhappy with the person I was turning out to be. (She told me so, without realizing it. She insisted that I could be "good" - someone else, really - if I only tried.) As the quarter hours ticked by, I would grapple with the fact that my mother had Had It. I could go back where I came from. Where I came from was very dim in my mind, a vaguely forbidding institution along the lines of the orphanage in Mighty Joe Young. But I knew that I did not come from her.  

Unhappily, I think, I grew up to be a thin-skinned man who tries to pretend otherwise but whose thought patterns, when kept waiting by someone, have the look of It's-All-About-Me grandiosity. It's never that someone is running late, but rather that someone is not coming at all. A tumbler has fallen in that someone's mind, and now he or she sees me as the domineering, asphyxiating, high-strung and entitled chatterbox that accords with my own private picture of Dorian Gray. Of course I'm going to be stood up! I'd stand me up!

And then, amazingly, the friendly face approaches, the kind email appears in my inbox, and I forget concocting an imaginary aversion so fierce that it put me at the dead center of someone else's life.  

Posted by pourover at 12:00 AM | Permalink

Crawling out from under a heap of Timeses, I rub my eyes and vacantly survey the scene. That's what I do every Monday, but not in public; as a rule, I'll have written up a book for Monday publication. The cupboard is bare today, however. There are several books in my to-write-up pile, but they all seem to be somewhat challenging. Take Measuring the World, for example - the book by Daniel Kehlmann that I read in St Croix. Perhaps because I haven't read much Pynchon, I haven't read anything quite like Measuring the World. When it wasn't making me laugh, it was at least making me smile. But a good deal of sleight-of-hand is involved, and I haven't figured how its tricks work. How does a brisk narrative whose surface is characterized by a childlike intensity of gaze upon the manifest present, as well as by a brusque, deadpan humor that I take to be peculiarly German - how does such a narrative convey the illusion of cosmic scope? When I can answer that question, I'll write up Mr Kehlmann's novel.  

In today's Times, there's an Op-Ed piece by Richard A Shweder that I found provocative. Entitled "Atheists Agonistes," the piece considers the recent spate of aggressively atheistical books, by such writers as Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins. Mr Shweder notes that the famously tolerant John Locke warned against tolerating atheists. Here's Locke, as quoted in the essay:

Promises, covenants and oaths, which are the bonds of human societies, can have no hold upon an atheist. The taking away of God, though but even in thought, dissolves all.

Locke's interest in "promises, covenants and oaths" marks him as a man who has not entirely moved out of the feudal atmosphere that, while thin, had not altogether evaporated by the end of the seventeenth century. He doesn't believe that an individual can make a calculated, self-interested decision to honor his commitments, reasoning that this is not only the most prudent but the simplest policy to adopt. I am always surprised to find that there are very bright people who behave well because they fancy that God is looking over their shoulder, because I would loathe such a God with Satan's rage, and probably take up a life of evil. This is not to say that I am an atheist. I don't happen to believe in a God, but I also don't profess to know the first thing about the possibility that God exists. The matter is actually of no earthly interest to me - and I have no unearthly interests. This makes it easier to agree with Mr Shweder's conclusion:

Instead of waging intellectual battles over the existence of god(s), those of us who live in secular society might profit by being slower to judge others and by trying very hard to understand how it is possible for John Locke and our many atheist friends to continue to gaze at each other in such a state of mutual misunderstanding.

Posted by pourover at 02:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

But I am puzzled by the last sentence. What does it mean? Is it trying to be funny?

Posted by pourover at 04:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

And now we are home, safe, sound, and not too cold. For the first time ever, we passed through Customs with nothing to declare. A couple of CDs, a T-shirt for M le Neveu, two brass bangles for Kathleen. The fifth of Cutty Sark and the tin of Planters Cocktail Nuts never left the room. Neither was empty when abandoned, either.

If there's something wrong with the laptop, I don't know what it is. I plugged it in and got a dial-up connection straight away. But I won't be taking that machine anywhere again.

Posted by pourover at 07:31 AM | Permalink

As it turns out, we did not escape Thanksgiving. It's a holiday in the US Virgin Islands as well. At the Mermaid, there was a "football menu" of finger food, and chairs were arranged in front of a big screen over in a corner. There was turkey at dinner, and Kathleen actually ordered it, even though she always says that she hates turkey, and especially on Thanksgiving.

After lunch, which we had on the early side in order to avoid the football, Kathleen melted into sleep. She had entered what we call Stage II of fatigue relief. In Stage I, which occurs every weekend, Kathleen naps but is otherwise alert as usual. Stage II is reached only after several days away from home, and it never lasts long enough to wind up naturally because Kathleen can't away from the office for more than a week. While Stage II lasts, though, Kathleen is so tired that she hasn't got the energy to be anxious about how tired she is. This is very different from, and infinitely preferable to, the dark exhaustion that can overwhelm her when everyday stress becomes chronically acute. It's too bad that our time in St Croix ends tomorrow.

I'm ready to go home, though; I've had my little reboot. At dinner (at which I was one of the few gents in jacket and tie), I tried to take the measure of how much I had changed in the past two years, not because I'd set out to change but because keeping the Daily Blague (and adding to Portico) has proven to be - what? The image that comes to me now, heaven knows why, is that of the pump and filter system in a fishtank. For the first time in my life, I can get up in the morning and expect that my mind will be aerated and fresh. I will work harder than I have ever worked in my life, day after day after day, but the effect will be the opposite of draining or exhausting. While I'm mostly grateful for having stumbled upon the knack of life at last, it is more than a little sobering to look back on decades of occupational confusion. So! No more looking back.

Posted by pourover at 10:00 PM | Permalink

It didn't occur to me until lunch today that Meredith Willson set forth my ideal vacation regime in The Music Man. Of course, I had to change a few words.

Eat a little,

Read a little,

Eat a little,

Read a little,

Eat, Eat, Eat!

Read a lot.

Eat a little more...

It's really that simple. We did take a walk along the beach that's long enough to take a walk on. It was a slog, because the beach is not only narrow but raked. The strip of packed-down sand that accommodates normal walking is exiguous at best, and because there is no discernible tide, it is always in the last wash of the surf. While not exactly penitential, it is a far cry from the sandy highway of Coronado Beach, the best that I've ever walked. In any case, we took our exercise, and Kathleen took lots of great photos.

After lunch, there was Measuring the World to finish, and the Review review to complete. While the rest of the world frolicked, I hunched virtuously over my laptop. Well, for a little while, anyway.

Posted by pourover at 09:00 AM | Permalink

My reading vacation continues apace. Having done with Nature Girl yesterday - if you can imagine a Feydeau farce set on a hummock called Dismal Key, then you must already have read this hilarious book - I was not quite ready to start in on Thomas Kehlmann's much more serious Measuring the World (translated by Carol Brown Janeway; Pantheon, 2006). Little did I know that Mr Kehlmann's book is not a very great deal more serious than Mr Hiaasen's; its drollery is just very dry. I would find this out in the afternoon, when I read nearly all of the novel, which is about two contemporaries, Alexander von Humboldt and Carl Gauss, who devoted their careers to the eponymous project but who otherwise had nothing in common. When we got back to the room after breakfast, I picked up the irresistibly packaged Intimate Nights: The Golden Age of New York Cabaret, by James Gavin (2nd edition; Back Stage, 2006). Opening the book way past the halfway point, I read about the birth of Reno Sweeney (the cabaret, not the Cole Porter character) and the death of the piano bar Backstage. Mr Gavin seems generously disposed toward most of his numerous subjects, but the atmosphere of dish is Venusian.

Today's lunch at the Mermaid (the Buccaneer's beachfront terrace) was not quite as amusing as yesterday's. There was an unbelievable "bar backup" that obliged me to eat my lunch without a glass of wine (the outrage!), and the background music was looped on the same inane steel-band piece for nearly an hour. More significantly, there were fewer guests to watch, as families headed home for Turkey Day. We saw this happen at Dorado Beach two years ago. Shades of "Death in Venice." Very sunny shades, bien sûr.

On Tuesdays, there is a Manager's Reception in the ruin of a sugar mill that stands next to the main building. I wanted to go, but after a long walk down Grotto Beach and back, Kathleen was pooped. She stretched out on the wide window seat and napped instead. That's why I almost finished Measuring the World.

Kathleen's decision not to go into Christiansted occasioned much inner and some outward rejoicing. Not only would I not have to worry about her when, inevitably, she checked in with a phone call ninety minutes after the appointed time, but she'd really keep things restful and simple. While I was measuring the world, she was laughing over a piece about a "swag party" in Vogue. That's the ticket.

Posted by pourover at 05:00 PM | Permalink

Not having Internet access is a bummer, and knowing that it might be just my fault - that it might be the old laptop, something I ought to have tested for before we left New York, and not some local problem (although the dial tone does sound odd) - hardly makes it easier for me to quash the desire to get back home right away in order to get to the bottom of the problem. Perhaps it will prove easier than I think to get beyond my childish disappointment. I'll be home in a few days, and I can live without my email just as well as the world can live without my entries. Actually, I can check my mail on the public computer in the lobby, and even write posts. What I can't do is upload Kathleen's photographs. And of course I can't write at length, because one is asked to keep one's computer time to fifteen minutes. If I'd brought my Iomegamini stick, I just might try to take advantage of a USB port, but I didn't, so it seems best to adopt the course that I've arrived at, which is to write as if I could post, and then backdate everything. As long as the backdating is discreetly noted, I can't see that it makes much difference in the long run.

The Prof warned me that St Croix was no Bermuda. I knew that as well as one can know something in advance of experience, but what I've found out is that I have desire to leave "the property," as the staff refer to the Buccaneer campus. Kathleen plans to go into Christiansted to do a little shopping (there's apparently an important bead shop), but she won't mind, she says, if I stay here. What we saw on the drive from the airport was almost depressing. This island needs a Board of Trade! There is the additional discomfort of getting into a van and bouncing around on roads through neighborhoods that I can hardly see because I can no longer crane my neck to raise the window line. My lack of curiosity about the island is almost surprising, but clearly I've bracketed St Croix with Yonkers and White Plains, the nightmare towns of my childhood, places to which I thought I might be deported for bad behavior. It is all - the Buccaneer aside - extremely drab. You have to be in love with the climate to bear it, and I am not in love with the climate.

Which is not to say that it's unpleasant to sit on the beachside terrace, enjoying a martini - but only one, and Chardonnay after that (my new regime) - and a club sandwich as only places like this know how to make. The people-watching is engaging, because there are lots of families and one can play the Darwinian game of seeing who takes after whom and wondering if the relation between the man and the boy at the next table doesn't have "step" in it somewhere. I devoted a lot of attention to  a family consisting (as I saw it) of a forty-something couple with four children, three girls (one of whom may grow up to be a supermodel) and then a boy, by the name of Cooper, and the mother's parents. The dad, I surmised, was a guy from an ordinary middle-class background who'd done well both at sports and academically and gone on to succeed at a serious corporation, managing a division perhaps, and taking his family out of its background forever. The father-in-law, I guessed, might own a car dealership or a major insurance agency, but his son-in-law was working on a larger scale. When I was hrough, Kathleen asked what other people must conjecture about us. Something as wildly wrong as what I'd just outlined, I replied.

Posted by pourover at 03:00 PM | Permalink

We're here in Christiansted, St Croix - and it looks as though I'm just going to have to take a break from blogging. For some reason, my laptop doesn't recognize the local dial tone, which could really be just another failure of the ageing machine. I wish that I could share the lovely pictures that Kathleen has been taking, but they'll have to wait until the weekend. Not that you don't have plenty to keep you busy until then.

Because I'd been assured that I'd have dial-up access in the room (which is lovely, with a beautiful view - and I was wrong about the surf), I was a bitter as well as frustrated at first. Kathleen's response was to go into town and buy a proper wireless machine. I wouldn't have it. Configuring a new machine far from home? Now there's something that I wouldn't want to do on vacation.

Be like me, and get yourself a copy of Nature Girl Carl Hiaasen's latest frolic. It's terrific fun so far.

Posted by pourover at 06:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (1)

So, how were we going to get up in the middle of the night to get off on our Thanksgiving vacation? We would have to leave the apartment at four in the morning in order to make the flight at six, Kathleen reasoned. I thought that I would take my new sleeping pill and sleep for a few hours. That didn't happen. We had a big fight instead. The usual one about holiday destinations. Kathleen went so far as to ask why I don't think that Bermuda is a "rock in the middle of the sea." Of course it is - but then it's also Bermuda, and not in the Caribbean. Amazingly, this discussion went on until shortly before three in the morning, and I was perfectly awake through all of it, which is even more amazing. So now I'm the one who's dressed, while Kathleen is snoozing. I'm wondering when I ought to tell her that it's time to get up. I think I'll wait until the car is buzzed up.

Posted by pourover at 03:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

The other day, I came across the lyrics to a Cole Porter song that I'd never heard of, and still haven't heard.* The song is called "The Physician," and it was written for Nymph Errant, a show of 1933. Here's the final refrain.

He said my vertebrae were "sehr schöne,"

And called my coccyx "plus que gentil,"

He murmured "molto bella"

When I sat on his patella,

But he never said he loved me.

He took a fleeting look at my thorax,

And started singing slightly off key.

He cried "May Heaven strike us,"

When I played my umbilicus,

But he never said he loved me.

 

As it was dark,

I suggested we walk about

Before he returned to his post.

Once in the park,

I induced him to talk about

The thing I wanted the most.

He lingered with me until morning,

Yet when I tried to pay him his fee,

He said, "Why, don't be funny,

It is I who owe you money,"

But he never said he loved me.

I've been stewing over this cleverness for a couple of days, and I've concluded that, once again, Cole Porter has nailed a truth about romantic love. It is always sparked by aspects of the beloved - usually aspects a lot more superficial than patellae and umbilici. A physician, of course, is trained to size up all the evident aspects of a patient without allowing them to form the image of a desirable person, but the rest of us, when we encounter an attractive detail, are more likely than not to see what other attractive details might be on offer. Given enough attractive details - unlike Porter's doctor - we eventually fall in love

Even love at first sight is not as immediate as it seems. I like to say that I fell in love with Kathleen before the first sight. The sound of her laughter, coming from the row of desks behind me, made me turn around pronto. "Wow," I felt when I saw her. "I've got to get to know her better!"

Does anyone know the song? Can anyone hum a few bars?

*In Cole Porter: Selected Lyrics, edited by Robert Kimball (Library of America, 2006).

Posted by pourover at 12:00 AM | Permalink

Well, I did go to the movies yesterday. I saw fifteen minutes' worth of ads and trailers. Then, just as Stranger Than Fiction was about to start, the projector jammed, and the film melted in that horrible way, and nasty sounds filled the auditorium. After another fifteen minutes, we were all given passes. We could come back some other time.

Had the projector done its job without incident, I'd have booked the most active day of my New York life. At half-past twelve, or just before, I presented myself at Crawford Doyle books, where I had no trouble meeting up with Mr Waterhot, a fellow-blogger from Geneva, in town to see some operas. After a nice lunch at Demarchelier, we spent the afternoon at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, taking in the special exhibitions ("Ambroise Vollard," "Americans in Paris," "New Orleans After the Flood") before sipping Chardonnay in the American Court. Shortly before six, I bundled us into a taxi, ran to the apartment for a pit stop, found another taxi, and got my delightful friend to his hotel in time - just, I should think; I am in some anxiety about possibly having held him up - to dress for an evening at the other Metropolitan, where he was to see Il barbiere di Siviglia. I myself raced over to Le Rivage, the French restaurant in Restaurant Row, to swallow a sole meunière and have some pork pâté wrapped up for Kathleen to gobble after Losing Louie, the comedy at MTC's Biltmore Theatre. This she did at the Starbucks next door to the theatre after the show. We had plenty of time to mosey down to 44th Street, where we turned right and found ourselves at Birdland, for the Nth Annual Django Reinhardt NY Festival's 11 PM set.

It was a great day. I had that "I'm alive!" feeling every minute.

Posted by pourover at 10:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

One thing that Kathleen and I independently remembered on Tuesday was our first Election Day in New York, on 4 November 1980. I still didn't have a job, and Kathleen decided to take the day off. (Surely it was not deemed a holiday at her firm?) We were going to paint the foyer of Kathleen's studio apartment, and we were going to paint it a hot pink, a color that Pratt & Lambert labeled "Parisienne." When we were through, we were exhilarated by the intensity of the small room's pinkness. It might have been blinding, but, not surprisingly given the manufacturer, it came off as a hot pink with subtlety. We would use the same color a year later to paint the foyer of our first apartment as a married couple, in the same building as the studio and in the same building that we still inhabit. Two years after that, we found that we were more or less done with hot pink. The foyer of our current apartment is painted a very dark green.

I remember reading, in an old House & Garden decorating book, that "color is a magic wand of excitement." Perhaps for that reason, it is a magic wand that most people seem reluctant to pick up. Colors are awfully easy to get wrong. I remember trying to give our bedroom walls the freshness of limeade, only to wind up with a room that was haunted by hospital green. Beyond the mundane risk of choosing unwisely, though, lies a deep-rooted prejudice against color in Western culture, absorbingly traced by David Batchelor in Chromophobia (Reaktion, 2000).

Since Aristotle's time, the discrimination against colour has taken a number of forms, some technical, some moral, some racial, some sexual, some social. As John Gage notes in his vast historical survey of colour theory, colour has regularly been linked with other better-documented sexual and racial phobias. As far back as Pliny, it was placed on the "wrong" end of the opposition between the occidental and the oriental, the Attic and the Asian, in a belief that "the rational traditions of western culture were under threat from insidious non-western sensuality." In later times, the Academies of the West continued and consolidated this opposition. For Kant, colour could never participate in the grand schemes of the Beautiful or the Sublime. It was at best "agreeable" and could add "charm" to a work of art, but it could not have any real bearing on aesthetic judgment.

The association of color with femininity and its bastard sibling, effeminacy, remains widespread, and I am sure that by talking up a hot pink foyer I raised a few eyebrows. I'll be the first to admit that my response to color is deeply sensual: the right color can startle both mind and body into a harmony that fairly throbs. Whether most men are actually incapable of such a reaction or are, rather, brought up to resist it I cannot say, but I suspect, perhaps optimistically, that it is a rare case of nurture trumping nature. Growing males are so eager to shun anything associated with girls that a non-essential regard for color will be suppressed without a moment's thought. Mr Batchelor finds the same anxiety at the heart of the Western disdain for color. I find it underlying the privileging of rationality, a distinctly Western choice that was first proposed by philosophers at a time when the Parthenon was blazingly polychromed. The men of the West appear to have talked themselves into a collective dread of the untidy and the complicated. It's the kind of dread that motivates people to ignore what they're afraid of, not to deal with it.

Hot pink did a lot to cheer us up after the shock of that long-ago Election Day.

Posted by pourover at 12:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

It was the simplest election ever. I just ran right down the Working Families Party slate, and everyone whom I wanted to vote for was there. What's more, these were all people whom I've supported in the past and have actually thought about.

I'm very, very excited about our next governor (knock wood).

Say, don't miss this extraordinary little Op-Ed from the Times.

Posted by pourover at 09:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

So, there's a new edition of The Joy of Cooking. I gather, from Kim Severson's piece/s in Thursday's Times, that the analytical rigor of former Simon & Schuster editor Maria Guarnaschelli, who oversaw the 1997 overhaul, has been roughed up with Rombauer-Beckerisms. In my opinion, Ms Guarnaschelli created reference work for the modern weekday cook of such excellence that it ought to have been given a name of its own, instead of trading on the Joy brand. I say, now, that I'm not going to buy the new book, but of course I'm going to look at it in the shops. With any luck, I won't be impressed - because I can't have two editions.

I never buy cookbooks anymore, because to make room for a new one means getting rid of an old one. I have more books about food and cooks than I have recipe collections. I have always shared Julia Child's belief that cooking is a matter of mastering certain basic techniques and classic combinations. Like most men, I don't seek novelty on my dinner plate as a matter of course. And I seem to be going through a change of life: food just isn't that interesting anymore. There are a few things that I'm crazy about (my fried chicken, for example), but I am very much someone who eats to live, not the other way round. So I probably all ready have too many cookbooks.

There was also, in the Times, an amusing piece, by Julia Moskin, about the craving for long out-of-print cookbooks. Nach Waxman, proprietor of Kitchen Arts and Letters, reports having over a hundred unfilled requests for Fernand Point's Ma Gastronomie. I myself filled out a request, once, in search of a copy of The Eating-In-Bed Cookbook, by Barbara Ninde Byfield (Macmillan, 1962). Someone gave it to my mother as a joke - I don't think it was I who did - and I dreamed of growing up and feasting on Caesar's Goat and Swordfish Agamemnon. I did bake the Elizabeth Barrett's Brownies for many years. And on one strangely memorable occasion I cooked up an orgy of food to be consumed in bed. Six or seven dishes - just for me! But I'm not nearly decadent enough to lounge for hours over tepidating food. It was fun to prepare and boring to endure. Mr Waxman never came through on the cookbook, but I found it through Alibris.

I know that I promised to tell you what I prepared for last Monday's dinner, but in fact there was no Monday dinner. M le Neveu had to grade mid-terms, and Ms NOLA needed an early night. Stay tuned.

Posted by pourover at 12:00 AM | Permalink

I was lunching at Café d'Alsace. It came time to pay the bill. I motioned to the waiter, with that little handwriting-in-the-air thing that I learned about twenty years ago. And I wondered, as I did so, how dumb did I look? Here I am waving my arm in a gesture that perhaps I don't have down very well. Just this once, anyway, it seemed awkward, awkward enough to make me feel self-conscious.

The idea for the show burst open like a broken piñata.

Two shows, actually. In the first, a group of waiters, nominally getting together after their shifts, lampoon the great and the good of Manhattan upon whom they've been waiting all day. In terms that would be hilarious (comprehensible) to out-of-towners. This show, like A Chorus Line, would have its moving moments, and it would run for fifteen years.

The other show would the same, except that it would be written for the delectation of the great and the good themselves. A show that it would require some working knowledge of Manhattan to enjoy. (There really are two audiences in New York. Just wait for the tourist joke in the "Schadenfreude" number in Avenue Q.) This show would be presented at an annual festival, with fifteen or twenty performances, and it would change every year, like Forbidden Broadway. It would run in September, after the rentrée.

I'm putting this out in the teeth of a reasonable expectation that twenty people will tell me that Oh, Waiter! (a working title) has been attempted a million times and never even reached the Long Wharf. The only credit that I can take for the idea is in identifying myself as a potential member of the audience. Again like Chorus Line, the show would be "written" by real waiters. There would be auditions - oh, the irony of that. Auditioning actors who are waiting tables for the time being - qua waiters!

Well, waiters off duty. In other words: actors.

Posted by pourover at 04:33 PM | Permalink

The building that I live in has a footprint shaped like the letter "H," but with a sizeable extra wing that juts out to the right of the top right-hand end of the letter. This means that there are twenty-percent more residents on the east side of the building than there are on the west. And yet both sides are served by the same complement of elevators: two for passengers and one for service. This works just fine on the west side. On the east side, the elevators are forever breaking down, or out of service for repair.

Every once in a while, my response to getting caught in a crowd of irritated neighbors blocking the corridor before the passenger elevators is to walk over to the west side of the building, take the elevator to the "penthouse" floor, and climb the flight of stairs to the roof, which I then traverse to get to the staircase on my side of the building. It's five flights down and my knees don't like it, but it's always better to be moving than to be waiting.

The other day, I paused for a moment, setting the mail on one of the mushroom-cap ventilators, to take this souvenir. This is the view that getting home occasionally involves.

It's rather like being on the crew that polishes the jewels in Topkapi or the Tower: the things that you get to see in an everyday way. I don't claim that there's anything terribly interesting about the particular scene on view in the snap. But I do know that there are residents of the building itself who would be brought up short by finding themselves so high up in the air in the middle of finding their way home.

Posted by pourover at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Here's hoping that you've been having a good weekend, and that you've been able to stand back a bit from everyday affairs. Kathleen and I have been reconstituting ourselves. We were going to watch The Morning After last night, after reading a bit after an ordered-in Chinese dinner, but Kathleen drifted off during the reading part, which I extended for several hours, eventually falling asleep in my chair over Running With Scissors, which is a grand read. I finished the book this afternoon, right before tackling The Economist. Every week, I try to extract one hard nugget of interest from The formidable Economist, and here is this week's: a French university known as Toulouse I offers the fifth-ranked business program in the world, after Harvard, Berkeley, Chicago and Stanford. Who'd 'a' thunk it.

During the week, the lineup just fell into place, and I now know what sort of piece I'll present on any given day of the week. Sunday's feature (which is what you're reading) has a rather weasely title, one that permits me to talk about what I've been doing in the kitchen lately, or to pretend that I'm sharing a cup of tea with you at the kitchen table, shooting the breeze. The table is very virtual. My kitchen is not big enough to hold a table. It doesn't really hold two people, not if they're trying to get anything done.

Portico - the Web site that I've been running since 2000 - has had a cooking branch, Culinarion, for most of that time, but for a spell I took it down. Cooking just wasn't a specialty of mine, and my interest in food has taken a nosedive since the turn of the century. Still, one has to eat, and, having been ambitious in the kitchen from my twenties to my late forties, I can make a variety of dishes without looking at a recipe or, for the matter of that, thinking. And the mail that I get from readers of Portico - as distinct from comments at the Daily Blague - exceeds all other mail in quantity, if not in length. The purpose of "Kitchen Table" is to get me to contribute to Culinarion more regularly.

We are sometimes four for dinner on Monday, when M le Neveu and Mlle NOLA join us. (Often, thanks to her hours, Kathleen can't make it.) M le Neveu is always happy to see steak of some kind or another, and when my mind has been elsewhere, that's a blessing, because steak requires minimal preparation. But for tomorrow night's dinner, I think that I am going to try a boeuf bourgignon. Or perhaps a coq au vin. Either dish is best when made a day ahead of time, but I don't have a proper wine in the house at the moment, so whichever it is that I make, it will have to wait for tomorrow. I may try something different, from Classic Home Cooking, of which I've just obtained the new edition. Whatever I do, you'll read about it here next Sunday.

Posted by pourover at 05:31 PM | Permalink

It suddenly occurred to me this morning that if a disaster of some kind were to destroy Bronxville, the Westchester suburb in which I grew up, I'd feel not a shred of extra regret beyond what such an event would trigger elsewhere. I'd be more interested, perhaps, but I wouldn't take it personally at all.

That's partly because Bronxville is so far in my past. I left it for school in 1963, when I was fifteen, thereafter coming home only for vacations. When I got out of college, "home" was in Tanglewood, a subdivision on the West Side of Houston. In 1977, I left Houston for good, and met Kathleen; ever since, memories life prior to '77 have paled, having no connection to the central fact of my daily life, my dear wife.

But Bronxville probably wouldn't feel like home even if I were younger. About ten years ago, Kathleen and I had dinner at the Field Club with several of her partners and their wives. Everyone was perfectly nice, but it was clear that they were up to their eyeballs in active sports, their own or their kids'. Given the venue, this was no surprise, but the talk was extremely wearying for Kathleen and me, and I made a note not to come back soon. (We haven't, in fact, been asked - not that I know of.) I remembered what an intellectual wasteland the place had been, and how lucky I'd been to go to Blair Academy, where the thinking was, for the first time in my life, generally rigorous. I wished I'd started sooner. 

In the end, I grew up missing, along with any interest in sports, any sense of home. This isn't to say that I didn't long for a home; I know that I taught myself how to cook just so that, wherever I lived, there would be a simulacrum of home. There would the fragrant warmth that was part of my idea of what home must be like. Lacking a nuclear family, I would fill my house with guests. I wasted years in attempts to create this home, and I'm afraid that I only abandoned them definitively two or three years ago. You can play house all you like, but somebody else has to create your home.

Which I have discovered, not by the negative implication of my life until 2000, but positively, right here, at this Web log. This is where, surprise-surprise, I not only live but feel the smell of home. Although I write what you read here, I did not create the Internet. Mina and Ben Trot, although much younger than I am, are my distant but endowing aunt and uncle.

Watch for a budding interest in Major League Baseball? Let's not ask for the stars when we have the moon. 

Posted by pourover at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Did anyone get one of these? Titled: Joy of Giving Something, Inc - Brain Gym #1 - the small booklet has the air of a small-museum exhibition program with a nice budget. Inside are (a) many photographs, almost all of them illustrating the carnage of war and (b) two very brief essays, one urging Americans to seek the advice of Europe when intervening in the Middle East (written by an American), the other denouncing Europe as appeasement-prone (written by a German). Both the American piece and the translation of the German piece date from last November. The German text itself dates from 2004. Along the bottom of the booklet's pages runs a list of history's major wars, from the Algerian War to the War of the Spanish Succession. Aside from a brief mission statement and a quote from Senator Clinton about Iran, that's it.

The mission statement invites one to visit the Brain Gym, a branch of the Joy of Giving Something.Inc Web site. I'm not going to characterize the Brain Gym, not, at least, until more people have had a chance to look it over. The site has a rudimentary feel, which only means that its creators are making things up as they go along. (I'm familiar with that!) The "Monthly Views" appear to be written by the pen of Bill Jay, a professor of photography. 

Joy of Giving Something.Inc is a charitable foundation that supports photography exhibits around the country. It operates out of an Upper East Side brownstone. Thanks to a link from an entry at Wikipedia, I gather that the foundation was endowed by Howard Stein, the financier who made $1.8 billion when he sold the Dreyfus Corporations (mutual funds) to Mellon Bank in 1994.

I have no idea how I wound up on the mailing list.

Did anybody else get one?

Posted by pourover at 12:00 AM | Permalink

Kathleen left for the office a few minutes ago, and silence descended upon the apartment. We had listened to the Scissors Sisters sing "I Don't Feel Like Dancin'" at least seven times. Kathleen certainly felt like dancing. She could hardly get dressed, she was so busy shooting her arms into the air.

The CD, Ta-Dah, has arrived, so now we can sing along, because we know what the words are. But what do they mean? Who is "old Joanna"? After living with me for far too long for her own good, Kathleen actually proposed Johann Sebastian Bach. What I want to know - salacious beast that I am - is whether, rather than dancin', the singer would prefer to engage in a three-way:

I'd rather be home with the one in the bed till dawn with you.

(Not the most tripping of lines, except when sung.) But, as Kathleen said, this is a dancin' song, not a thinking song.

Posted by pourover at 09:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

A few weeks ago, I bought some cheap tickets online, to see Bernard Shaw's Heartbreak House at the Roundabout Theatre. Great cast. Philip Bosco, Swoozie Kurtz, Byron Jennings, et alia. Not the best reviews, but, hey, it's Shaw; it's good for you - and the tickets are discounted. We get such offers in the mail all the time, and I've recently decided that we need to take advantage of them. Unfortunately, I am really not on as a theatre ticket buyer. For one reason or another, I'm just not as careful buying theatre tickets as I am with serious music. They're not really the same sort of event: plays run for weeks, while concerts just may occur twice or three times. The bottom line is that I have a pair of tickets to Your Dreams Here that I can't use because we'll be seeing Così fan tutte at City Opera that night.

As for tonight's debacle, I neglected to note that Heartbreak House, being a long-ish show, begins at seven, not eight. I'd have caught this if I'd had the tickets in hand, but the tickets were will-call, and I didn't read the offer very carefully. So I didn't know until....

Minutes before Kathleen showed up at the AA Roundabout Theatre, I took a critical approach to the lack of people going into the theatre. It was then that I looked at the tickets - which I had just picked up.

Long story short: we walked up into the real theatre district and got two very good seats to Butley, the Simon Gray play, premiered thirty-four years ago and written for the late Alan Bates. The new production stars Nathan Lane and Julian Ovenden. It ought to be the hit that I remember Butley having been back then. But it's still in previews, so I shan't say more.

Except that, when I count my blessings, I'll count tonight.

Posted by pourover at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

Afterward, I couldn't believe that I'd done it. We were at Carnegie Hall last night, at the first concert of the new Orpheus season. 

At intermission, two thirtysomethings who had been sitting four rows ahead of us were joined by a friend. He stood leaning on the back of the seat behind him, facing the rear of the hall, as he chatted. I was standing in the aisle, beside my seat, waiting for the other people in the row take their seats before sitting down myself. From snippets overheard, I hypothesized that the visitor might be pianist Jeremy Denk, who will be performing at Orpheus's next concert, and who also keeps a very intriguing Web log, Think Denk. Mr Denk has posted a snapshot of himself at the blog, something that hastened the identification process.

Qua pianist, he was safe from my attentions. Qua blogger, however - quite another matter. Still, I had to work up the nerve. When he left his friends, appearing to my mistaken ears to decline their offer to join them in an adjacent, empty seat, I let him pass right by. When I turned to see where he'd gone, I'd lost him. But, lo, suddenly there he was again, returning to his friends. I caught his eye, tried to look as harmless as possible, and asked him if he might be who I thought he was. He very affably said that he was, and he shook my outstretched hand as I told him that I was "R J Keefe, Daily Blague," effectively taking it for granted that he would know what that meant. He registered recognition, although it may have been simple politeness. I made a remark to show that I'd read his latest entry (indeed, I'd been thinking about it while hypothesizing), said that I was looking forward to hearing him in December, and then let him go. He couldn't have been nicer.

The encounter firmed up my resolve to make some additions to the main-page list of links to other sites. A recent exchange with Steve Smith, author of Night After Night, inspired me to make an exception to my general rule, which is that I don't link to monothematic blogs. Blogs exclusively devoted to music and concertgoing would seem to fall under the ban, but in fact it's impossible to write at any length about music without being very person, however inadvertently. If you're at all interested in serious music, I'm sure that you'll find the sites that I've listed under the rubric "I Musici" interesting.

As for the concert....

Posted by pourover at 06:14 PM | Permalink

Not the best photo - sorry! For much more dramatic shots, visit Cynically Optimistic.

Returning from an errand, I overheard a doorman say that he was going to go up to the roof to see what could be seen of an accident that had just happened. A small plane, it seems, crashed into an apartment building near the East River. By the time I got up to the roof with my camera, the fires were still raging, although they died down quickly.

I had been reading David Denby's review of Little Children.

After a while, one realizes that Perrotta and Field may be creating a metaphor of life under terrorism. It's not that Ronnie isn't a genuine threat, but he causes people to lose all sense.

It seemed, walking along 86th Street, that every fire truck and ambulance was roaring its alarm. Later, I would hear the beating helicopters.

A very unsettling experience. 

Posted by pourover at 03:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I was just talking to my old friend George, whose vehicle broke down in Gulfport, Mississippi. While we talked, he hopped on a bus and went to the waterfront, where he regaled me with descriptions of the persisting ruination. (Even the Coast Guard station has not been rebuilt.) It was like having my own private Ira Glass/NPR. George got quite into it: I was worried that he might be apprehended by the authorities. But whenever he bumped into anyone, his voice shifted over into Good Ole Boy. At one point, he said to someone, "It don't matter tuh me" with an authenticity that completely veiled the fact that he'd just been talking, in model English, about C S Lewis's Screwtape Letters.

At one point, George muttered something about my having other things to do, and I replied that, no, I didn't. That's right, he said, I don't pick up the phone if I have something better to do. In fact, I called him, in response to a text message that he sent to my Gmail address. That's right, George said again: you don't have to worry if my mind is elsewhere when you're talking to me, because I don't stay on the phone just to be nice.

And I thought, is that a good thing or a bad thing? I'd stay on the phone to be nice to someone in a crisis, or suffering a loss. But otherwise, I stay off the phone unless I really want to hear someone's voice.

Posted by pourover at 01:12 PM | Permalink

A few years ago, I couldn't stand being the only kid in the crowd who didn't have a Filofax. Kathleen and my old roommate carried the leather-bound calendars, stuffed to bursting with all sorts of ad hoc addenda, the very height of organizational efficiency, c 1850. So I begged and whined, and eventually got one for my birthday. It wasn't long, though, before my Filofax was buried in a drawer. Filofaxes don't ding you with an alarm the day before you have to do something. No, you have to look at them first. If it were up to my Filofax, I'd miss half the plays and concerts that I had tickets for. Don't laugh - there was a bad season in which we missed far more than half! Outlook keeps me straight these days.

But a Filofax is still an objet de luxe - if you have one, you ought to use it. In a recent burst of fevered optimism, I made up a to-do list that included the following: "Filofax - other uses?" The answer to that question came to me this evening, and I'm still choking. Because what I propose to do with my Filofax is to run the Daily Blague with it. I am going to schedule entries and pages, instead of waiting until the spirit has moved me to write them. Every day, there will be certain things to do. The era of "What do I feel like doing now?" is over. It's killing me, frankly, because what I "feel like" is not having to make such decisions all the time.

So the management part of the blog will henceforth be conducted in pencil. That's the other crazy thing: I'm incapable of using the computer to "automate" my editorial duties. Outlook has a more or less useful task manager feature, but I've never been able to bring myself to look at it. The computer is for writing and looking things up, not for brainstorming. Planning is something that I do on paper. Typically, I then ignore the paper. But if it's folded into a Filofax, along with all my Daily Blague deadlines and Internet contacts, then maybe the small leather-bound bundle will insist upon being the start of my day.

You think that working for yourself is easy, until you have to do it.

Posted by pourover at 11:47 PM | Permalink

The seventh New Yorker Festival has come and gone, and I'm pooped! Ms NOLA and I attended five events this year - none of them the ones that she really wanted to see, but all available several minutes after the tickets went on sale on 7 September. I lost precious minutes to updating my credit card information at Ticketmaster. We live and learn.

To get an idea of the fun we didn't have, check out Emily Gordon's delirium at Emdashes. We were much more sober - there was no dry ice, and all the drinking was done in advance. Malcolm Gladwell gave an electric presentation about computerized assessment of movie plots capable of suggesting changes that will add millions to the box office. I didn't bother to remember the details, because the story is going to appear in The New Yorker tomorrow - or it would if tomorrow weren't a federal holiday (= no mail). It was good to hear John Ashbery read some of his poems, and Ann Lauterbach joined him for the reading of a portion of Litany. In that work, two readers speak at the same time, and the result probably sounds strange to people who don't try to eavesdrop at cocktail parties.

Otherwise, it was stand-up comedy all the way. Gary Shteyngart, George Saunders, Calvin Trillin, Anthony Lane, Mark Singer even - all of these men can take to the stage whenever they please. Mr Shteyngart won't even have to work out a routine. The chunk of Absurdistan that he read was a great deal funnier than it had been on the page. Mr Lane could not have talked faster, but his paean to Ava Gardner forced him speak overtime. (It was almost embarrassing: we were confronted with a man who seemed prepared to throw his life away for an actress's smile.) Mr Saunders read some forthcoming stuff that I can't wait to have entire.

The demographic shifts were interesting: heavily under-thirty five for the novelists, Mr Gladwell, and Mr Ashbery; heavily retired for Mr Trillin (in conversation with Mr Singer). Without making a point of doing so, Mr Trillin's conversation ranged over the history of The New Yorker, the staff of which he joined the year after I started reading it. He had keen things to say about journalism, and how very protected from its rush New Yorker writers used to be. Afterward, at lunch, I chewed over what he'd said, and came to see that this relatively new feature, the New Yorker Festival, has taken the venerable magazine one step closer to an institute of higher learning. Students of The New Yorker University scuttled across the campus of Manhattan in pursuit not so much of edification as of the kind of solidarity that the best universities' students feel.

Last year's Festival was something of a bouleversement for me, mostly because of Malcolm Gladwell's talk about preciousness and late blooming. This year's Festival bore traces of sophomore slump: nobody said anything that got to me where I live. That's not a complaint by any means! I hope that I get to go to at least six events next October! Three cheers for TNYU!

Posted by pourover at 06:31 PM | Permalink

In the current issue of The New Yorker, Milan Kundera has compiled some notes in answer to the question, which is also the title of his piece, "What Is A Novelist?" He begins by determining what the novelist is not, id est a lyric poet. The following passage rings true as a bell (never mind what it is that we can make deductions from - Hegel, actually):

From this we can deduce that the notion of lyricism is not limited to a branch of literature (lyric poetry) but, rather, designates a certain way of being, and that, from this standpoint, a lyric poet is only the most exemplary incarnation of man dazzled by his own soul and by the desire to make it heard.

I have long seen youth as the lyrical age - that is, the age when the individual, focused almost exclusively on himself, is unable to see, to comprehend, to judge clearly the world around him. If we start with that hypothesis (necessarily schematic, but which, as a schema, I find accurate), then to pass from immaturity to maturity is to move beyond the lyrical attitude.

If I imagine the genesis of a novelist in the form of an exemplary tale, a "myth," that genesis looks to me like a conversion story: Saul becoming Paul; the novelist being born from the ruins of his lyrical world.*

It must be observed, first of all, that the world is awash in lyrical novels. I dislike them as a rule; A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is one of the few exceptions that I can think of, and even then the extent to which that book is a novel is uncertain. Young writers, like young people, are self-absorbed because they're busy absorbing the world, or enough of it to convey a sense of their own place, their own limits, their own follies. The world is new, fresh, and exciting. And it's a struggle. Lyrical people usually have a somewhat difficult time building a career. (Better to outgrow lyricism in the natural way. Mid-life crisis, which is nothing but the eruption of stifled lyrical impulses in creaky middle age, can cause real damage, and it is usually fairly ridiculous.) Only irresponsible types find the conditions of youth amusing. But, as Mr Kundera goes on to say, it is only when we can make out the "soft gleam of the comical" on the surface of every human ego (especially our own) that we can call ourselves mature. 

Sadly, the piece is not available online, so hunt down the October 9, 2006 issue in any way you can.

* Translated from the French by Linda Asher.

Posted by pourover at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In half an hour, I'll be at an agreeable brasserie two blocks from home, and so will Kathleen and a dozen of our near and dear. Kathleen and I can't really celebrate our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary until Tuesday, but next weekend was impossible for a few key guests, so we're jumping the gun.

I may even make a speech. I know that certain others will!

Posted by pourover at 05:38 PM | Permalink

It took a while. I woke at five-thirty, my throat a torrent of gunk. It wasn't until eleven that, wondering why I was feeling so poorly, I remembered Monday's flu shot. They don't ordinarily affect me, but this one seems to have kicked up some reactions.

On the bright side, it was a sick day! I could stay in bed and read. I felt well enough for that. What I read was Tom Perrrotta's Little Children. I missed the recent film*, somehow, which is just as well, because I enjoyed Mr Perrotta's deft narrative. The only problem was that I instinctively cast the movie quite differently. I saw Cynthia Nixon and Aaron Eckhart as the guilty lovers. Mr Eckhart is perhaps a bit too old for the role of Todd/Brad, but I'll be surprised if Patrick Wilson, who actually plays the role in Todd Field's movie, clouds his face with the character's confusion as well as Aaron Eckhart would.

Then I watched a movie - it was by now after dark. I watched La femme de Gilles, by Frédéric Fonteyne. It stars Emmanuelle Devos, an actor whom I've been following ever since seeing her in De battre mon coeur s'est arrêté. She plays Elisa, the wife of a factory worker in the north of France in the Thirties. Her husband (Clovis Corvillac) conceives a passion for her sister, Victorine (Laura Smet), and when he confirms his wife's suspicions, she resolves to wait out the passion. She assures him that it will end, and it does. But whether she foresees what will follow - what Gilles will feel after he loses interest in Victorine - is the question that haunts the movie. All I'll say is that if the movie ended a minute or two earlier, I could show it to Kathleen. But I recommend it highly to anyone who can take a strong French film, beautifully made.

I'm feeling better this morning, which is good, because I'm going to conduct Ms NOLA's parents on a Met tour at noon. 

PS: I've been listening to old music interesting enough to get me to refresh the "Tune de la semaine" feature. Don't forget to click on the "(about)" link if you want to know what the new tdj.ra is.

* The 'recent film' opens this weekend. Good timing!

Posted by pourover at 09:00 AM | Permalink

Changing my mind on the adoption issue has unleashed a lot of strong sentiment. Giving up one one lie - refusing to regard the American way of adoption, between World War II and Roe v Wade, as anything but monstrous - seems to have set off at least one other sudden switch. It's about the acceptability of American football.

I can understand wanting to play a game, dimly. Whether my poor hand/eye coordination is innate or inane doesn't much matter. I used to like to play Monopoly, but now I'm afraid that it would bore me to death, and the "original edition" set that I bought a few years ago remains shrink-wrapped. I don't relate well to games. And exertion for its own sake puzzles me. My fondness for conversational ballroom dancing might be a pointer to the kind of physical activity that appeals to me. I like to dance, but not with someone I'm not talking to.

I can't understand sitting and watching other people play a game. I can fake it. I can talk about crowds projecting themselves upon the teams that they're rooting for. But what's the point? I still don't get it.

So: I don't have a favorite sport. I'm absolutely indifferent to sports. I'm neutral.

Except, I'm not. I'm not indifferent to football. All the grace of a completed forward pass cannot redeem what is essentially a brutal game that domesticates violence. It doesn't transcend violence, as, say, basketball does. Football simply harnesses it to the line of scrimmage, and sauve qui peut.

Having received two degrees from the University of Notre Dame, I know a thing or two about the sociology of football. In my undergraduate career, I went to no games after my freshman year. As a law student, however, I went to most of the home games, because it was a hoot to sit with classmates and carry on. I'd have been perfectly happy if the teams had been playing soccer.

Why weren't they? What does that say? How can we be complacent about what's going on in the field?

Discretion forbids my discussing the background of this unforeseen enlightenment, but I can say that it has upset the foundations of an important friendship. That's why I am writing this. This entry is not an argument against football. It is simply a form of notice. Your elation about a football victory is only going to excite my disgust.  

Posted by pourover at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Little did I know that yesterday's Times would prolong the quandary that I spoke of in the previous entry. The front-page story was entitled "In Tiny Courts of New York, Abuses of Law and Power: Judges Without Legal Degrees or Oversight Rule in Arcane System Across State."

Does that sound, maybe, a little Iraqi to you? Let's not go into why it does. (If it doesn't, you're reading the wrong blog.) Let's just take a breath and sing "O Canada." Things are so much simpler there. There are so many fewer people, for one thing!

Why has no one written of the melodrama that yokes New York City, an international entrepôt that draws thousands of disaffected Americans-from-elsewhere to its bosom every year, to New York State, a red-meat outfit that, except for all of Ithaca and just the University of Syracuse, ought to be offloaded to Tasmania? Where are the witnesses to this atrocity? The non-New-York-City parts of New York State are just big enough to arm-wrestle the city to the ground. There ought to have been a "civil war" in New York, just to free the enslaved intellectuals.

The whole story about the baboon judges is great, but here is my favorite excerpt:

In an interview, Justice Pennington said the commission had treated him unfairly. But he may not have helped his case when he told the commission that "colored" was an acceptable description.

"I mean, to me," he testified, "colored doesn't preferably mean black. It could be an Indian, who's red. It could be Chinese, who's considered yellow."

There are probably lots of provincial Americans who think that "colored" is still a useful term. That's how we are. But we don't have to make them justices of the peace, capable of incarcerating strangers who don't gratify their expectations. And here is my question: if this is the state of things in New York State, why would we expect anything better in Guantánamo or Iraq? When on earth, people, are we going to clean up our own little mess? We're certainly not going to do any good abroad while "simple men, and their simple wisdom" are running the show in American localities.

Posted by pourover at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

It's late Sunday afternoon, and I'm about to sit down with an oppressive stack of magazines. I won't be looking at The New Yorker or The New York Review of Books, nor probably the London Review of Books, either. Or Harper's. Those are the periodicals that I look forward to reading. It's the homework mags that I've got to look at: The Nation, The Economist, the Wilson Quarterly, and Foreign Affairs. France-Amérique doesn't get the attention that it deserves, and I can't make up my mind about The Atlantic. Bookforum shows up from time to time, its continued existence always a faint surprise.

In a fantasy that I find increasingly beguiling, an efficient intellectual expert shows up one fine day and tells me how to do my job. Sometimes, the expert even tells me what my job is. I know what some of my duties are. I have to publish a fresh entry every day. I'm expected (by whom?) to review The New York Times Book Review - a weekly task. Ditto my trip to the movies every Friday. I used to read the blogs on my list every weekday, but I've lost that habit and must fight to regain it: this is a two-way street, buster. But a list of duties doesn't add up to a job. The one thing that the expert does every time that I indulge my fantasy is to persuade me that I don't really need to read The Nation, The Economist, or even The New York Times. Yippity yay!

Yes, that's the problem with fantasies.

It does occur to me quite regularly, however, that although I may want to run a daily Web log, writing about books, ideas, and the bits of New York's cultural life that I make time for - although this may be my desire, and although I may actually get it done, somehow, it does not follow that I know how to do it. But perhaps the very idea that I'm not doing the job very well is the first step to enlightenment. 

Posted by pourover at 05:36 PM | Permalink

Arriving at the Beekman with time to spare, I discovered that I didn't have my wallet. I was fairly certain that I'd left it at home. I'd been very upset about something on my way out, and I'd evaded the usual protocols that assure that I go out into the big city well equipped. If I didn't carry my Metrocard separately, I lamented, then this wouldn't have happened. As usual, I had no small change or money of any kind in my pockets. So I walked across 67th Street to First Avenue, caught a bus, got off at 86th Street, returned to the apartment, found my wallet right where it ought to be (when I'm at home, that is), went back downstairs and caught a taxi at the bottom of the driveway. There were a few bottlenecks on Second Avenue, but I got into the Beekman thirty-five minutes after I'd made my unpleasant discovery. I did not disabuse the guy in the booth who sold me a seniors ticket.

So it will be a little while before I find out how much of Niall Johnson's Keeping Mum I missed.

Continue reading about my Friday ramble at Portico.

Posted by pourover at 12:00 AM | Permalink

Où est le portable? Où? Où? Où? Où? Où!

Why don't we dial the number and see what rings.

Posted by pourover at 10:42 AM | Permalink

A photo from Le Monde, 8 September. Our supine media gods would never let it run here. This man is a jerk.

At Sale Bête, I read that there's a march against Bush this morning, outside the UN. Édouard's going to be one of the marchers. "You can't just do nothing" is how I would translate his French - idiosyncratically, to be sure, because I can't imagine doing anything except sitting right here and writing. I'm still working out the personal consequences of Bush's second presidential victory. It forced me to recognize that there simply is no question about it: I'm living in a closet. I'm pretending to be as patriotic an American as anybody else. Well, I may like the idea of the United States, and think highly of the Constitution and so forth. But as for Americans - Gawd. Too many of them voted for the man.

Posted by pourover at 10:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The main book at the moment is Blood and Roses, by Helen Castor. It's an incredible account of the Paston family's determination to hold on to its properties. Ms Castor has done an amazing job of fleshing out real people from the formulaic letters that this family exchanged during the heat of the Wars of the Roses, which I used to think of as rather grand when I was a kid but which I now see as the worst sort of civil breakdown into thuggery. Ms Castor is so dogged about properties that I want to ask if she herself is the child of traumatically dispossessed parents.

And then there's Murder in Amsterdam, Ian Buruma's book about "the limits of tolerance" after the assassination of Theo van Gogh. The book is yet a mystery; I have no idea how I'm going to regard it. Part of me wonders if I'm still going to admire the author when I'm through. These are difficult times.

As for listening, it's two CDs 24/7. Either the original cast album of The Drowsy Chaperone or the collaboration of the groups Sarband and Concerto Köln that Archiv produced as "The Waltz." The first CD is a surprise, because one had given up on the possibility of good Broadway tunes. The Chaperone's tunes are good, not great, but - my Lord - they're GOOD, and you can listen to them over and over. I'm an accident waiting to plumble! (That's a quote?) .

You may think that Blood and Roses is some pretty history book about an old family, but it's as engaging as a novel can be about Topic A: holding on to property. Unsettling as hell.

Posted by pourover at 12:00 AM | Permalink

It was a day unlike any other. First, there was the business of buying tickets for the New Yorker Festival. In the age of the Internet, a hot event of the Festival's size can sell out in thirty seconds. Forget the toll-free number! I had the presence of mind to log on to Ticketmaster.com ahead of time, but in the event I lost crucial moments to updating my credit card information. As it was, I emerged with tickets to five events - up from last year's three, and the previous year's one - but I failed to snag seats for two cool gigs that Ms NOLA had her eye on, as well as for the Roz Chast/Steve Martin event that Kathleen would have liked to attend.

While that was going on, a friend who's in town on potentially exciting business was coming to meet me for an impromptu lunch. Meanwhile, Kathleen, who was off to Maine this weekend for a much-needed reunion, found herself in a sudden pickle. The car service that she uses suffered a computer breakdown, putting it temporarily out of business and forcing Kathleen to take a taxi to LaGuardia. The pickle was that she wasn't carrying enough cash to pay a taxi to take her to LaGuardia. She'd planned to take care of cash at the airport. So I power-walked the two blocks up 86th Street to Citibank, staged a minor (legal) holdup, and power-walked back. The power walking was in vain, because Kathleen couldn't get a taxi in midtown.

Now my friend arrived from a long drive, wanting to go upstairs to freshen up. While I was unlocking the door to the apartment, Kathleen finally called from a taxi. Great! Now, like everyone in New York, I imagine that other people's taxis are magic carpets: they have only to step into them to arrive at your door while you're still setting the table or filling the ice chest. Kathleen's taxi turned out to be sorely lacking in magic-carpet qualities. For twenty minutes or more, I stood among the parked cars across the street from the building (to save time; Kathleen would be heading east). I was beyond wanting to give up when the cab finally pulled up and the rear window went down. For the second time I wished Kathleen a safe trip and managed, somewhat awkwardly given my neck, to kiss her goodbye.

Then there was lunch, which was necessarily brief: my friend had to be in the World Financial Center by three o'clock. I came back to the apartment, to find that the phones were dead. Razr to the rescue! The conversation that I had with Verizon's robot lady went smoothly enough; "she" told me that the problem was the phone company's and that it would be fixed by two in the afternoon today. Who needs landlines, anyway, thought I, as I called Crawford Doyle, the bookseller on Madison, to see if they had either Jonathan Franzen's new book or Deborah Eisenberg's recent one. They had both. This time, I didn't power-walk.

When I got back, it occurred to me that I'd better let Kathleen's parents and Miss G know that our land lines weren't working. Twenty minutes later, of course, they were.

It's hard to believe that the magazine that was so placid when I started reading it at the age of fourteen has become quite so edgy. The New Yorker Festival schedule was not announced until Monday - and only online. Although the schedule was also published in the 11 September issue of the magazine, which would ordinarily have come on Monday, the magazine couldn't be delivered until Tuesday, because of Labor Day - something that the planners must have foreseen. In effect, one had three days to make up one's mind. It was like some mad college course registration.

Posted by pourover at 12:00 AM | Permalink

On Friday, Ms NOLA and I visited the Morgan Library and Museum. As at the Metropolitan Museum, there's an important show of Rembrandt's etchings on display, but what I wanted to see was the architecture, which got rave reviews when Renzo Piano's envelope opened, a year ago last April. I had not been very impressed by what I saw in the Times, but I was curious enough to accede to Ms NOLA's suggestion that we make a visit on the last of her Summer Hours afternoons. (We'd had a scheme of going to Coney Island, but the approach of Ernesto scotched that idea.) I hadn't been to the Morgan in years, and not since reading Jean Strouse's superb life of the financier. 

The Morgan Library is an assemblage of three older buildings. The oldest, 239 Madison Avenue, was built in 1852 for the Stokes family; it was one of three, and Morgan eventually owned them all, tearing down the other two. (On the linked floor plan, this is the building that contains the Morgan Dining Room and the gift shot. The building was not hitherto part of the public Library.) The newest is the 1928 annex, built by Morgan's son, Jack, four years after he opened the Library to the public. The most arresting structure - at least until now - is what was called "Mr Morgan's Library." Designed by McKim, Mead, and White, it is a redoubtable pavilion of four very ornate rooms. These buildings have now been united by what feels like a vast glass sheath, although it's rather more substantial than that. One thus enters each of the older structures from the rear. The Library itself is entered from a new flight of steps on Madison Avenue. There are a few new galleries, but the principal additions are a new Reading Room and a sunken auditorium. And let's not overlook the glass-box elevators. These seemed designed to boast of the Library's spruce tidyness, and, at least for now, they do.

The original Morgan Library, completed in 1906, was something of a treasury, and more closely resembles a beaux-arts bank than a place in which to read. Here Morgan amassed his collections of the small and the rare. While accredited scholars, I presume, can gain access to the thousands of books in the old library, the Library's holdings are largely off-limits to the casual visitor. Only a few items are on display at any one time. This makes visiting the Library a somewhat precious experience, in both senses of the word. I find that other people's collections of things are almost always somewhat precious, but then I lack the collector's bug.

The combination of vaulting space and innumerable, unseen doodads is jarring. I could not suppress the sense of all hat and no cattle, where "cattle" stands not for objects but for impact. The "hat" - all that new Renzo Piano cubic footage - seems really to be the point of the newly-constituted Library, and I am sure that many, many parties will be given in it.

What did I like? I liked Sargent's portrait of Morgan's daughter-in-law. It graces a flight of stairs, so don't get stuck on the elevator. In a new exhibition space on the second floor, cases in which musical scores were displayed stood to the east of cases holding books and related materials. In one, devoted to Jean de Brunhoff's Babar, there was a sheet on which de Brunhoff brushed wonderful blobs of watercolor in grey, pale green and brown - as if showing his merry king through a fogged and rainstreaked window. I craved it instantly. As for the scores, they're of no small psychological interest. Bach seems to write with a burning impatience; there are no mistakes or erasures, but the swooping lines that bind his runs together suggest a mild panic that something might be forgotten before the composer wrote it down. Beethoven, in contrast, writes like a kid who's having problems with his sums and not having a very good time. I don't think that I've ever seen Schubert before: rather messy. Mozart's scoring looks great, until you try to read it.

And I spent a lot of time trying to read it. No matter where I looked in the manuscript, I could not make out the beginning of the Haffner Symphony. Perhaps the pages have been shuffled. The unbound sheets of Mozart's autograph score sit in an enamel presentation box in the fine, Louie-the-Phooey style so beloved by Ludwig II of Bavaria. A printed fabric lining on the open lid identifies the contents with heavy, Second Empire veneration. We're talking serious kitsch.

Posted by pourover at 12:00 AM | Permalink

Last Thursday night, I lost my Razr phone. It slipped out of a pocket at some point when I was carrying rather than wearing my jacket. I learned the hard way that Razr phones belong in pants pockets. I had to pay full price for the replacement, on Saturday. Let that be a lesson! I also signed up for insurance.

The moment the phone's disappearance was noted, everybody I ran into had a story about what a nightmare the Cingular store is, at least in terms of waiting to be served. You write your name on a sheet of paper, and when all the names above yours have been crossed off, it's your turn. Arriving right after the store opened on Saturday morning, I was, unfortunately, the third customer in a shop with two assistants. I had to listen to a New Yorker of a certain type, about my age, as he prolonged his sojourn at the counter with questions that almost seemed idle (such as "How does that call-waiting thing work? What button do I push?" I wish I'd overheard the answer, but still, there's a manual). The curious thing was that the guy didn't really listen to the polite-given answers; he was too obviously busy framing his next question. When the transactions was done and the receipt had been signed - and did I say that the transaction was over - he loudly observed that many of his friends swear by Verizon and insist that it's the better service/network: what did the clerk have to say to that? I almost threw up my hands.

Irritating as this was, it wasn't as bad as the monstrous tyke who on Friday afternoon had been doing a very g