The first new book of the new year: As Always, Julia: The Letters of Julia Child & Avis DeVoto, edited by Joan Reardon. There is nothing I like better than a book of correspondence, with letters exchanged between two people presented in date order; and there are few masters of English prose who rival Julia Child’s command of serious fun. Of even greater interest to me is the letters’ tracing of Child’s later-life self-invention, which, I gather from reviews, was not smooth. “Alternately self-assured and self-doubting,” writes Reardon, describing the Child of the letters; in the Book Review, Corby Kummer puts it more strongly: “alternately confident to the point of arrogance and insecure almost to the point of giving up.” That sounds familiar. I try not to be arrogant about what I’m doing here, and I never even whisper words about giving up, but I bounce back and forth between the outer suburbs of both extremes. Child was lucky to have the friendship of a woman who understood the world from a less angular point of view.

Right at the moment I’m not in the middle of a heatedly active correspondence; partly this is because all I want to talk about is my glorious grandson who is so supremely remarkable and unlike all other children ever born. (Yes, sometimes even Kathleen wishes that she had a hearing aid that she could turn off.) Partly it is because I’m engaged in writing what amounts to an open letter to everybody. (You’re reading it.) Mostly, though, it’s because I haven’t found the right partner for the kind of dance that intrigues me at the moment. (And that partner hasn’t found me.)

What I want even more than a correspondent at the moment is a rival, a competitor, somebody else who is doing what I’m doing — whatever that is. Indeed, it’s when I get to see somebody doing what I’m doing that I’ll know what it is that I’m doing. Gun to my head? I’m scouting the Internet for visions of a better world, one that’s more mindful, less wasteful, and wholly humane. I’m trying to figure out how to make the values and resources that we associate with “the elite” comprehensible and available to everyone. Sounds pretty quixotic — but in the absence of a sparring partner my mind can’t be bothered to work any harder at its job description.

The genesis of the Child-DeVoto correspondence is oblique and could not have been predicted. Child wrote a letter to Bernard DeVoto, a Harvard professor and a columnist at Harper’s, in response to his piece about dull kitchen knives. (She enclosed an inexpensive but sound French knife.) Her letter was answered, as was most of his mail (one gathers), by his wife and gal Friday, Avis. Avis was described by one of her husband’s students, Reardon tells us, as “very good looking and very sexy-seeming and the only faculty wife who might have said ‘horseshit’ to President Lowell.” She liked to cook, too. Best of all, she had entrée to the world of publishing. But none of these datapoints explains why she and Child (a) hit it off and (b) exchanged hundreds of letters. You might as well explain it in terms of feng shui.

Perhaps, if Will’s extraordinariness would only dwindle a bit this year, I might become more attentive to the rest of the world. Until then, I can only ask you to keep your eyes out.

Three new pages at Civil Pleasures: 

¶ This week’s Book Review review, “The Ideological Divide.” 

¶ Gotham Diary: “Gravity.” 

¶ Friday Movie: Inside Job.

A word about Inside Job: I did not see the point in reviewing this powerful documentary as a film. I saw it with a film student, a cousin of Kathleen’s, who came away shrugging: Charles Ferguson has captured a horrible mess, but what can we do about it? I thought I’d write about that instead. What we can do right away is to learn how to think about what kind of failure(s) made the derivatives disaster possible.

But there was one thing about the film qua film that bothered me: all those pretty aerial shots of Manhattan! The stately homes of England are no more kempt than the placid bed of towers that we see from every angle. At one point, the East River is captured in sheet-of-glass mode, between tides. New York neverlooks lovelier than when you can’t see any people! 

What was all that about? Was Mr Ferguson suggesting that Manhattan is a garden, sedulously tended by angels in the employ of plutocratic bankers who don’t care how broken the rest of the country is?

Who experiences New York City from the aerial point of view? Not New Yorkers themselves; you can’t get from A to B, even in a Town Car, without a little streetside friction.

Long before the end of Inside Job, the bird’s-eye views were making me wince. New York may well be the capital of the “financial industry” (an oxymoron on steroids), but there is a great deal more to this town than that. If Charles Ferguson wants his viewers to share his animus for Gotham, then he ought to make his request explicit. As it is, Inside Job indulges in urban abuse.

Regular readers will have noted, perhaps to their chagrin, that entires at The Daily Blague and The Daily Blague / reader have boiled down to two varieties, the Daily Snip and the Daily Office.

Everything else that we’ve been working on appears at Civil Pleasures. We’re still getting the hang of linking the the Web log to the Web site; we’ve only just begun to see that what’s holding us back is the rudimentary navigation at the site. The menus are paltry, and there’s no way to tell at a glance if there’s something new to read.

Meanwhile, here are a couple of links to recent pages: this week’s Book Review review (reviews have been condensed, with more — and sassier — writing by the Blagueurs, and fewer extracts from the reviews, onto monthly pages): the latest Gotham Diary; and a few (more) words about Freedom, which the Editor fancies only he understands.