In The Descendants, Alexander Payne’s camera lingers over the pristine Hawaiian real estate long enough for you to get used to how beautiful it is and focus, instead, on just what “pristine” means. There is a lovely beach, but there are no bathers. There are no buildings. There is nothing but Hawaii. And you want it to be left that way. There are already more than enough seaside hotels, an obscene number of golf courses. At the very least, the 25,000 acres of King Trust land that’s up for development ought to be preserved in its wilderness until we figure out how to develop it less crudely than we develop things now.

Where do developers come from, anyway? Where they ought to come from is an advanced-degree program, and they ought to be licensed like doctors and lawyers. It’s not enough to pass laws that developers will prove adept at circumventing or even flouting. It’s not enough to mark parcels of land as untouchable. The very race of developers must be reformed.

***

After months of eyeing them in the butcher’s case at Fairway, I bought a half-dozen Italian meatballs. It turns out that three meatballs are enough for Kathleen and me; she can eat only one, and two fill me up. The meatballs are quite firm, and develop a nice crust when they’re browned in butter. (They’re easier to cut with a knife than with a fork.) And they’re deliciously seasoned.

Spaghetti and meatballs — how many decades have passed since I last had spaghetti and meatballs? Kathleen and I both recall the horror that came out of a can when we were children. Tubs of the stuff in school cafeterias. (And Kraft “parmesan” in green cans.) Then — nothing. As Italian food began to be taken seriously, spaghetti and meatballs was struck from the menu. It had to be. Even if it was prepared well, it reminded everyone of the bad old days. And it is actually a bit easier, if you’re starting from scratch, to make a good ragù bolognese.

So easy, in fact, that I’m sick to death of ragù bolognese. I can’t stand my sausage and mushroom ragù anymore, either. And I’m increasingly inclined to regard pasta puttanesca as a first course — a little goes a long way. I’m still happy to eat a heap of spaghetti alla carbonara, but Kathleen doesn’t care for it. So I’ve got to find a good recipe for marinara sauce, or something even simpler, perhaps. I bought a bottled sauce, put out by Silver Palate, to accompany the first round of meatballs; now that I’m sold on the meatballs, I need a better sauce.

***

I’m still puzzling over Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Why? That’s what I’m asking. When the movie was over, it was over; it left nothing. I had been duly engrossed in paying attention to its austere understatements, but all I felt at the end was “Thank heaven that’s over.” Meaning not the movie but the Cold War. How silly it was! How utterly adolescent-male. It all came down to loyalty or dis-, played as a game of three-card monte with guns. It seems to me that counterspies were cultivated simply as a means of forestalling the endgame. And for the British, playing the game had the additional urgency of signalling (with a lot of hand-waving) that the UK still mattered in global affairs. I do want to see the movie again, though.

Resisting the newspaper, I picked up The Liberal Imagination and read the essay about The Princess Casamassima, Henry James’s novel of the late 1880s. I’ve read the novel twice, but not recently. Let me be the first to admit to the seductiveness  of its title, which shows James at his worldliest. The title turns out to be hugely ironic, but you don’t know that when you pick it up the first time. Princess Casamassima would have been grand enough — what name could suggest a vaster palace? But by inserting the definite article, James raises the wonder higher, and puts the lady on a level with the Sun King. In the way of titles, that is. You want to know more.

But all I ever remember of The Princess Casamassima, aside from a blurred sense of cockney settings that aren’t, after all, the sort of thing that draws me to Henry James, is the lush description of Medley, the old house in which the tragic hero, Hyacinth Robinson, has his first taste of the “country.” The house ” was richly gray wherever it was not green with ivy and other dense creepers” — it almost seems a natural feature of the landscape. Which is of course the whole point of the very exclusive “country” that could be found here and there in the English countryside. I can’t think of another passage in James that so particularly identifies the features of a house, but then it is not usual, in James, to view architecture through the eyes of a poor young man who has never been far from London.

How appealing would the more apt title, Hyacinth Robinson, be? I have to say that “Hyacinth” sets off a cognitive muddle. It’s so fancy! Sure, the hero’s mother was a French maid. But it’s hard to imagine anyone at any social level making it through twelve years of English life with the burden of such a name. The name is also as ironic as the title: our Hyacinth is a not very floral terrorist. And “Robinson” drags in Defoe. I would have to be paid, a lot, to read Hyacinth Robinson. But I’ve read The Princess Casamassima, as I’ve said, twice, for free. Now I’m wondering if I’m in for a third visit.

Trilling’s essay is impassioned by an almost lawyerly zeal to defend a novel from Henry James’s least popular period, the middle. Between Washington Square, The American, and Portrait of a Lady at one end of his career, and the trio of thrillingly dense novels the closes it, there range a baker’s half dozen of books that only James fans and academics bother to read. It’s not that they’re bad novels, but they’re inferior as books by Henry James to the degree that they are less dramatically focused than the early works and less dazzlingly complicated than the later ones. But Trilling isn’t trying to make a case for The Princess Casamassima as “great” James. On the contrary, he locates it in the tradition of “great” European novels that runs from Le rouge et le noir through The Idiot. He describes the type as “the young man from the provinces” novel. A poor young man is wafted by chance into the precincts of wealth and power, and at the very least suffers almost fatal disillusionment.

It isn’t by virtue of being such a novel that The Princess Casamassima strikes for Trilling the note of true greatness, however. It is the book’s “moral realism” that makes it “an incomparable representation of the spiritual circumstances of our civilization.” That’s what Trilling says. Looking over his shoulder, I wonder if it isn’t the way that James applies his moral realism to the political circumstances of his story that excites Trilling. The easiest way to describe The Princess Casamassima to someone who is otherwise well-read would be to compare it to Conrad’s The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes. These are stories about anarchist conspiracies and assassination plots, and they were much on people’s minds toward the end of the Nneteenth Century. In the Twentieth, they would flower balefully in the crushing dictatorships that brought the world to a second hot war in the 1940s and then to a cold one, at the very beginning of which Trilling was arduously assessing the legitimacy of liberal opposition to communism. That what the following extraordinary passage is all about:

It is easy enough, by certain assumptions, to condemn Hyacinth and even to call him names. But first we must see what his position really means and what heroism there is in it. Hyacinth recognizes that few people wish to admit, that civilization has a price, and a high one. Civilizations differ from one another in what theygive up as in what they acquire; but all civilizations are alike in that they renounce something for something else. We do right to protest this in any given case that comes under our notice and we do right to get as much as possible for as little as possible, but we can never get everything for nothing. Nor, indeed, do we imagine that we can. Thus, to stay within the present context, every known theory of popular revoltuion gives up the vision of the world “raised to the richest and noblest expression.” To achieve the ideal of widespread security, popular revolutionary theory condemns the ideal of adventurous experience. It tries to avoid doing this explicitly and it even, although seldom convincingly, denies that it does it at all. But all the insincts and necessities of radical democracy are dagainst the superbness and arbitrariness which often mark great spirits. It is sometimes said in the interests of an ideal or abstract completeness that the choice need not be made, that secuirty can be imagined to go with richness and nobility of expression. But we have not seen it in the past and nobodoy really strives to imagine it in the future. Hyacinth’s choice is made under the pressure of the counterchoice made by Paul and the Princess; their “general rectification” implies a civilization from wich the idea of life raised to the richest and noblest expression will quite vanish.

 We may not need The Princess Casamassima now quite as much as Lionel Trilling did sixty-odd years ago (when the novel itself was sixty-odd years old), but we certainly need Trilling’s insistence on the kind of “superbness and arbitrariness” for which a liberal society ought to make sacrifices, and without which the superiority and aloofness of mere wealth are empty evils.

It’s the same old story. I felt okay yesterday, so I ran a bunch of Wednesday- type errands. On the final stretch home, though, I noticed that I was both sweaty and chilled. I got into dry clothes as soon as I reached the flat, but the damage was done. I’m coughing a bit, and I’m only mildly congested, but I’m still cold, no matter how many sweaters I pull on. A reading day is indicated.

Happily, I’ve got books that I want to read. The life had rather gone out of my stack, possibly because we had spent too much time together in the past two weeks, my current books and I; more likely, I needed something exciting to read. That’s why I went to Crawford Doyle yesterday: maybe they had something that I hadn’t heard of. It wasn’t very likely (abominable conceit), but I was desperate. They did not in fact have anything (in fiction) that I hadn’t heard of. What they had was Lauren, a staff member who has advised me in the path. She recommended four titles, one of which was Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station. I remember hearing about this novel when it came out, largely because of “Atocha,” which not only was the site of horrific terrorist bombing in 2004 but also serves as the setting of the grandest scene in Verdi’s Don Carlo. (Peter Conrad’s new Verdi and/or Wagner was something that I hadn’t heard of until I saw it at Crawford Doyle yesterday; I bought it on the spot.) I think that I was put off by the review’s mention that Lerner is a poet. I allowed Lauren to quell my misgivings. And a good thing, too. Leaving the Atocha Station is funny and interesting; I want to find out if Adam, the narrator, will turn out to be a schmuck in the end. The novel very much belongs alongside Chris Bachelder’s Abbott Awaits, which I read during the holidays.

The other book that I’m enjoying is — well, there ought to be a word for it: a book that you ought to have read decades ago, in college at the latest. It’s a book that you have meant to read ever since you heard about it, but that you haven’t read because it does seem awfully serious, possibly a little fustian. It is a book that you bought several years ago. You finger it from time to time. Then, finally, it bites. Or you bite. You start to read. You feel tremendously foolish. You ought to have read this decades ago, in college at the latest, &c &c. And who the hell is V L Parrington?

The book is Lionel Trilling’s collection of essays, The Liberal Imagination, which appeared in 1950. Trilling clearly presumes that you know who Parrington is. “His ideas are now the accepted ones wherever the college course in American literature is given by a teacher who conceives himself to be opposed to the genteel and the academic and in alliance with the vigorous and the actual.” That’s from the first page of the first essay, “Reality in America.” Trilling proceeds to bury Parrington beneath a heap of small compliments and dry ridicule, and he does the job so smoothly I was pretty sure at essay’s end why I’d never heard of V L Parrington. And now I had a clearer idea of why my antennae had always steered me away from Theodore Dreiser, whom Parrington admired.

At this point in my life, it’s a real memento mori to come across an unfamiliar name, borne by someone whose now-forgotten influence once spread widely over a field that I spend a lot of time in. But then, do I? Parrington was one of the founders of “American Studies,” a parcel of literary and historical work that I have endeavored to stay out of. But I have a nodding familiarity with the names of Perry Miller and F O Matthiessen, who also helped found American studies; and I certainly know the name of Sherwood Anderson, the subject of Trilling’s second (and even more crushing) essay, and the author of a book, Winesburg, Ohio, that I remember not picking up a lot.  

What I couldn’t have understood about American Studies was its grounding in a sentimental Jefforsonian agrarianism that proved to be absolutely ineffectual at steering  the country away from the lures of Gilded-Age capitalism. I haven’t quite figured out what Trilling’s agenda is; I’m conscious only of dealing with a very cagey writer. But I applaud his demonstration that, if you want to call the Robber Barons and their government agents to account, Parrington’s is not the way to do it.

 

Here’s news that Hostess Brands is filing for bankruptcy. Last fiscal year, it posted revenue of $2.5 billion and a net loss of $341 million. The losses, we’re told went to servicing corporate debt and obligations to pension and health-care plans. Which is to say that Hostess did not lose money making Twinkies. The debt, I’m almost certain, was incurred in the course of various restructurings, not as capital expenditures on plant.

I’d sure like to know more, because Hostess seems, if not representative of America industry overall, then afflicted with its principal illnesses. First, the benefits nightmare. I’ll be the last to say that workers don’t deserve generous pension and health-care benefits after retirement. But why do we expect individual corporations to provide them? Because it smells better than socialism, for one thing, and, less benignly, it introduces a whiff of free-marketry into the undertaking, since benefits are negotiated between corporations and unions. Why do we have unions? For the same reason that the government doesn’t provide retirement benefits directly: unions are proof that we are not socialists.  Hostess Brands has declared bankruptcy because, like the former Soviet Union, it can no longer afford to pay for the Cold War.

Then there’s that debt. The private equity firm of Ripplewood Partners is mentioned, but only as “seizing control” in 2009. Then what happened? IMy guess is that the debt was “restructured” — that is, postponed but increased. The story of the underlying debt is what I’d like to hear. Once upon a time, Interstate Bakeries, as it then was, was just a bakery. Then somebody had the bright idea of diversifying, either by buying other businesses for the bakery or by selling it to a larger outfit. One imagines a spell, lasting from the Eighties into the Nineties, when the company’s strength — popular snack-food brand names — struck executives as unspeakable banal.

Nobody needs to eat Ding Dongs, so calling Hostess a “utility” is something of a stretch. For better or worse, though, millions of Americans reach for Hostess products ($2.5 billion’s worth) when they crave whatever it is that junk food provides. They ought to be denied only if the manufacture of cupcakes becomes prohibitively expensive, or if the baking process is shown to be dangerous. The  Hostess shelves at the convenience store ought to remain well-stocked otherwise. If Twinkies disappear for any other reason, it will signifify that American leaders don’t know how to allocate costs and responsibilities, and that American businessmen are too easily distracted.

 

 

It dawns on me that the photos that I’ve been thinking about taking this week were inspired by a funny cartoon in last week’s New Yorker. It’s by William Haefeli. A man stands by an apartment door, dressed to go out, and says to his partner (in a Haefeli drawing, you cannot infer marriage), “I’m ready to go whenever you’re through fussing with tablescapes.” It’s pretty clear that “fussing with tablescapes” is meant to be a kind of self-absorbed navel-gazing; certainly it’s not something that you ought to do when someone else is waiting to go for a walk. In fact, you had probably best be alone.

I don’t fuss with tablescapes nearly as much as you might think. During the weekly dusting, I clear the table and wipe it clean, and I take a damp cloth to whatever isn’t paper. Then I put everything back where it was. Once a year, at the most, there might be a rethink. Some things never change: the Royal Doulton statuette of a lady in riding costume (one of my mother’s treasures) has been standing in front of that Mottahedeh plate, accompanied by the two whelk shells, for twenty years at least.

What a ghastly word, tablescapes. Has “still life” come to mean only the painting of a still life?    

***

How curious it was, just now, to go to Fairway right on top of reading about it in The New Yorker — the current issue, this time. Patricia Marx has a piece about the better-known specialty food outlets in the Metropolitan Area (that’s to say that she includes Stew Leonard’s, an operation that in ten years of Connecticut weekending I never patronized once), and she manages to exclude the Balducci’s, who run, on the Upper East Side alone, Grace’s Marketplace and Agata & Valentina, the latter an indispensable resource for me, even with the new Fairway across the street. “You wouldn’t walk seven blocks to go to the Food Emporium,” she has Fairway CEO Howie Glickberg saying. “But you’d walk seven blocks to come to Fairway.” I’m very glad that I don’t have to walk seven blocks to go to Fairway; as for the Food Emporium, which is on the ground floor of my building, I have not set foot in it since the day Fairway opened, back in July.

The other day, I overheard a man in the elevator say to another man. “It’s two levels; you can’t find anything.” I could not help noting his heavy outerborough accent, which suggested that this was a guy who wasn’t going to look for anything that wasn’t where he expected it to be. But even for New York, where grocery stores are often laid out eccentrically (it goes with the real estate), Fairway presents a steep learning curve. Why is the bakery downstairs, beneath the deli, rather than the other way round? Would it kill them to carry a few dairy items on the street-level floor? Surely something a little less staple might have been shelved opposite the stockroom doors, across an already rather narrow aisle? And that downstairs organic area: in less than six months, it set up its own funky vibe, a marketplace for those who put soma ahead of savor. But, hey, I’m not complaining.

I read the Marx piece over a quiet lunch at Café d’Alsace, which I’ve rather neglected lately (and not so lately). I did not, for once, have a croque monsieur; I was afraid that it might seem too rich. I had an omelette instead, with the most delicious caramelized onions. Tempted to linger over a third glass of wine, I wisely drew the line at two, collected my things, and went to the post office, which was, as I’d hoped, deserted. I still had a few cards and calendars to mail, including two to be sent abroad; business was so slow that the clerk offered to fill out the customs forms. When I got home, I wrote down some advice for next year, which I printed out and tucked into a Mary Engelbreit Christmas book that Kathleen unearthed. This book will not be stored away. It will stay in the writing table drawer. I finally realized that, although you can and indeed must store Christmas paraphernalia in a place apart, it’s a good idea to keep the instruction manual handy.

The one piece of advice that I’d like to give, but don’t know how, would be a good tip for avoiding colds and flu at holiday time. I hope that we never go through that again!

***

I’m listening to a strange playlist, clearly more the skeleton of one than anything actually thought out. It alternates Schubert’s piano sonatas, Mozart’s wind concerti, and all of Ravel’s music for orchestra other than the two operas, with a garnish of Strauss waltzes and polkas. Strange to say, it works. I don’t think that Schubert and Ravel are alike in any musical way, but both were drawn to the unusual, and Schubert is as colorful in his way as Ravel. The interesting thing is that neither sounds odd when juxtaposed to the other; perhaps what I’m trying to say is that the obsessive sonatas and the vivid dances don’t flatten each other. Even the Strauss seems fresh and even a bit cheeky.

I’m also reading a biography of Ravel (1875-1937), by Roger Nichols. I’m not sure that I’m having any fun. I’ve got to about 1903, and Ravel has written a handful of important pieces, namely the string quartet and Jeux d’eau. He has lost two attempts at the Prix de Rome, and, really, there doesn’t seem to be anything veyr remarkable about him, except for his short, trim figure. It turns out that he was a “mediocre” pianist — how extraordinary, considering the virtuosity required to play what he wrote. The text is full of forgotten names, and there is a lot of close musical analysis that demands more than I’m willing to give at the moment. But I shall carry on, closing my eyes and thinking of Paris whenever the going gets rough. I just hope that the book doesn’t make me like Ravel less. The music, I mean. I like liking Ravel.

When Kathleen left for the office this morning, I got out of bed, where I’d spent several very comfortable hours breathing and having mildly bad dreams. On the thirteenth day of my cold, bad dreams were about as interesting as anything else in my ravaged head, and I was tempted to write about them. Happily, I picked up the Times instead.

Rachel Donadio’s story about young Greeks going “back to the land” — to the island of Chios, to be precise — was intriguing but incomplete. I wanted to know more about the new tools, particularly what the French handily call informatique, that the over-educated twenty- and thirty-somethings are bringing with them when they take up heliculture. What we would call “smart farming.” Then there’s the sad story of Edul Ahmad’s many victims, out in Queens; Guyanese immigrants, they trusted a flashy rogue wheh he misled them about the affordability of housing,  and now their mortgages are being foreclosed. David Dunlap writes about the burning of the original Equitable Building in January 1912, a disaster that would have branded itself more indelibly in the city’s sense of history if it hadn’t been for what happened at sea four months later. The ruined Second-Empire structure, claimed to be fireproof, was quickly replaced by the massive building that remains at 120 Broadway. This was where my father’s office was, the first time he brought me into the city to see where he worked. It was only about forty years old at the time, but it seemed awfully old-fashioned, with its Roman marble lobby and its thrilling elevators, each one manned by an operator.

But I would not have been more surprised by the Titanic‘s steaming into New York Harbor than I was by Bill Keller’s call for Hillary Clinton to run as Barack Obama’s Vice President in November. The idea, Keller says, “has been kicking around on the blogs for more than a year without getting any traction” — which is why I don’t read political blogs anymore. Now that Bill Keller has dragged it into the middle of the room, the prospect of Clinton’s candidacy is so attractive that Obama’s people ought to be getting on it right now. (Better yet: Obama fires all of his people and hires Clinton’s.) The scenario outlined in the Op-Ed piece is preternaturally politique: Hillary resigns from State; Biden takes State; Biden keeps State when Hillary becomes VP. Nothing less than a White House endorsement of the scheme will restore my confidence in the second technocrat in the Oval Office — a president whose record seems now to be almost as disappointing as that of the first, Herbert Hoover.

Well, here I am, at the age that Paul McCartney and John Lennon made proverbial  forty-odd years ago. Since I do the needing and feeding around here, I’m not asking any questions.

I was going to say something about Tyler Brûlé this morning, but I’ve just learned what I ought to have known days ago: an old friend in a faraway city has been in hospital for almost two weeks, and I believe that he is seriously ill. His stoicism has always obliged him to make light of poor health. I have sent him my love, but I’ll refrain from peppering him or his wife with questions.

Yesterday, I ceased to be a sick person and became a normal person with a bad cold. I haven’t had such a bad cold in years. It seems wildly solipsistic to say so, but I blame my vulnerability to the virus on the shock of my aunt’s sudden death last month. I say that it was sudden because that’s what it felt like, even though my aunt was in the hospital for nearly a month. She was taken ill, but she was expected to recover — and then she didn’t. Facing the prospect of long-term dependency on oxygen tanks and the other ministering angels of geriatric medicine, she elected hospice care. She made her decision very quickly and would not be talked out of it. It was sudden.

We say that we don’t want the elderly to suffer and we’re dismayed when a loved one lingers on in semi-consciousness or worse, but until we have tasted pity and dismay, we want to keep death at bay.

For days, I’ve been saying to myself, “And this is just a cold. What would it be like to be really sick?”

And that’s the view from 64.

This time, I’m watching the Inspector Morse series in order. I am now. By the time Kathleen rustled up a chronological listing of the episodes, ranging from “The Dead of Jericho” to “Remorseless Day,” I’d watched four episodes. The first one, “Deceived By Flight,” had been easy to choose. I have a thing for Jane Booker’s plummy dry wit (Booker plays an undercover customs agents who’s in pursuit of the cricket-playing drug runners.) Daniel Massey is in the cast — the image of his father, only better-looking. I had completely forgotten his murderer was his wife. That’s the thing about these shows. They’re so packed with layers of story that you can hold on to only a few of the brighter details, like John Normington’s plummet from the spire of St Oswald’s, in “Service For All the Dead.” You may remember who dun it, but, if so, you’ve probably forgotten quite why.

Choosing a second episode to watch was harder. Agony infected the process. Is this the Morse that I really want to watch next? After much shuffling, I selected “Happy Families,” for the simple reason that the title didn’t remind me of anything. The moment the show started, of course, I knew precisely what I was in for: the gruesome decimation of a family fueled by revenge and silly charity in unequal measures. I take it back: sometimes you can remember everything. I even remembered that Kevin Whately would have to dress up like a Wild West sherriff. It was great fun.

By now, in the firm grip of a Morse jag, knowing that I’d have to watch each and every one — in the kitchen, mostly, while emptying the dishwasher or brewing a pot of tea, with the rest of my normal life serving as the spotty commercial breaks — I grasped that it would never do to go on choosing. I kept the CDs in a drawer in alphabetical order, and I think that I watched the shows in that order once, on a long-ago jag — a perhaps unsurprising number of the titles begin with “Dead” or “Death.” I wasn’t going to do that again. I was in the middle of “The Infernal Serpent” (picked because I remembered the studied adagio of Barbara Leigh-Hunt’s impeccable diction) when I resolved to go on-chronology. I remembered “The Dead of Jericho” fairly well, but I’d forgotten that Gemma Jones’s character really does hang herself. And I knew that Morse’s Jaguar would be battered in the interests of justice at both the beginning and the end.

Last night, after dinner, Kathleen and I watched “Service of All the Dead.” I’d finished “The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn” (the second episode) while making dinner — which, in the event, I could hardly eat, because I’d been drinking so much water all day that there was no room in my stomach; among the unappetizing thoughts that crossed my mind at the table was the factoid that you can drown from drinking too much water — and when Kathleen suggested that we watch a Morse, I jumped. Because, as our viewing bore out, “Service” is one of the muddiest of the Morses. Much of it is filmed in a dark old church, full of arrestingly gruesome statuary, lighted by lurid stained glass. The story is unusually tricky, and the storytelling far from straightforward. Kathleen hadn’t seen the episode before at all, and she couldn’t quite believe it when it was over.

One notable thing about “Service of All the Dead” is that it’s the first in the series to have no real University connection. Such episodes are rare, but I’m going to keep track of them as such. (“Happy Families” is another.) In fact, I’m thinking of devising a dataset. “Canals,” for example — do the waterways running through what was, after all, initially a ford figure in the action? That’s a simple yes-or-no. Rating the overt hostility of Morse’s superiors to his “methods” calls for a scale of 1 to 10. The relation of Morse to Detective Sergeant Lewis is more in the nature of a correlation, with .5 representing Lewis’s misgivings and 1 Lewis’s outright doubts.

Although I visited Oxford in 1977, I wasn’t there for very long, and I remember nothing very clearly except stepping into Brasenose, of all places. (I’d be a law student myself a few months later.)  Google Maps has provided inestimable help in placing the scenes that the Inspector Morse series makes so familiar. The labels are hopeless, but that doesn’t matter, because all the series’s colleges are imaginary — Beaumont, Lonsdale, and others. What’s harder to believe, after all these years, is that Morse is imaginary, too.

Nothing could induce me to say that I am feeling better. That would be an out-and-out jinx. Kathleen is almost certain to get much better soon, because the doctor has prescribed a powerful antibiotic. With nothing worse than a humble cold, I’ve nothing to fall back on besides prudent self-restraint. Feeling really lousy is simple: you just lie there an moan. It’s when you feel “okay” that things get tricky.

Yesterday, for instance, prudent self-restraint was imposed onluy after I had run three local errands, one of which involved buying a lampshade, which most observers would probably judge to be non-essential even if I beg to differ. I made the third trip to Agata & Valentina simply to buy applesauce for Kathleen; it turns out that Kathleen really likes the applesauce that they make there. Kathleen begged me not to make a special trip just for applesauce, but I was feeling better than “okay.” (I did take a cab back to the apartment.) Then I removed the Christmas tree. Like the lampshade, a non-essential, except for purposes of morale and will-to-live.

I had planned to make spaghetti and meatballs for dinner — I’ve been wanting to try Fairway’s meatballs since the store opened, in Julty — but once I’d cleaned up after the tree I no longer felt okay. What I felt was washed-out and liable to take a chill. So I bundled up and sat down in front of the old Nippon Electric television — more than twenty years old — and watched videos.

First, we watched At Bertram’s Hotel, one of my favorites of the old Jane Hickson series, in great part because of the bold performance of Caroline Blakiston. Ms Blakinson appeared in Woody Allen’s Scoop — I recognized her instantly, even if her name wasn’t on the tip of my tongue. She has of course also appeared in scads of British TV shows that I’ve never heard of. I wonder if she has worked much on stage.

Then we watched two movies that I’ve long associated but never watched back to back: Get Shorty and Big Trouble. The movies share the bright breezy tone of their ultimate authors, Elmore Leonard and Dave Barry respectively, and they also share Renée Russo and Dennis Farina. What they don’t share is the aame weight, as joint consideration of the shared actors’ roles makes very plain. Get Shorty is a giggling rumination on the improvisational opportunism of the movie business that shudders with hidden sordid backstories, the most sublime of which would be that of Harry Zimm’s — played by Gene Hackman as the ne plus ultra of assholes. Big Trouble is a delicious farce with a few mismatched seams (Jason Lee’s role, I’m thinking).

I took my Lunesta and went to bed, and slept well through most of the night. No NyQuil or other decongestants. Nothing could induce me to count on that happening again tonight, but I do hope. They say that summer colds are the worst, but they’re wrong; the worst colds are holidays colds, especially if you have a pretty Christmas tree in the middle of your foyer that reminds you, every time you go anywhere in your apartment, how out of kilter you feel.

Scroll down for Boxing Week updates. (26, 27, 29, 30 December 2011; 1 January 2012)

This is the time of year when all the great stories are family stories, and therefore private, not for sharing even at Facebook. But it’s grand to know that the Internet is there when you’ve maxed out on personal input. Here’s the Internet equivalent of stepping outside after a close family gathering and having a smoke: What would Voltaire have made of the Internet? What would the Internet have made of Voltaire? The second question is easy. Basic biographical material about Voltaire includes the gaming of a lottery that made the man a millionaire. It was legal, but just. It would be pretty to think that Voltaire became a self-supporting philosophe on the proceeds from Candide. Pretty.

Meanwhile, you should see the hat that Kathleen is knitting for me! Production is in its final phases as I speak. It is so capacious that I can pull it down over my mouth — but of course it will shrink in the first wash. We were arguing about how to finish it, with a tassel or a pompom. About pompoms, Kathleen said, “I know how to make them; I’ve just never done it.” I might have gone along with this assurance if I hadn’t just read Daniel Kahneman. We’re settling on a jingle bell. There’s always next year.

Ray Soleil says that Will will never refer to me as “Doodad” to his peers, and that’s probably correct. What I’m wondering, though, is whether Will will agree with the tens (I could have said dozens) of children who have pointed me out to their mothers and said, “Santa Claus!” Will Will be the opposite of Virginia O’Hanlon (thanks, Eric!), writing to the papers to insist that Santa Claus is not only real, but a denizen of Yorkville to boot?

Almost certainly not. Will will understand from the get-go that Santa Claus can’t strew gifts beneath a tree if he doesn’t have chimney access. Even if he is your Doodad, and, boy, have I got presents to strew!

The other story about Voltaire that I’m fond of tells of his colossal, almost suicidal indiscretion at Fontainebleau, which he visited with his mistress, Mme du Châtelet, during the palmy days of Pompadour. Bored after a spell of standing in the room where the courtiers were playing cards, he leaned over to his lady-love and stage-whispered, “How can you play with these cheats?” First, they were lucky to escape the château alive before midnight. Second, see the part above about gaming a lottery. My father used to say that I had more books than sense, but I’ve often thought that Voltaire had, although even more books, less sense. That’s why I keep him around. Also, he kind of looks like Dad, my dad.

Boxing Day

I’ve little more on my mind at the moment than registering that I’m alive, and tolerably well, after a couple of lovely, lucky days of Christmas. I had planned things prudently, and luck threw me a few good turns. When we sat down to dinner on Christmas eve, it wasn’t with the same people we’d expected to dine with, but, all in all, an improvement: my adorable grandsom, whom we used to call “Mr Dinner Party” because would sit through an entire dinner and eat almost everything, has developed a healthy little boy’s aversion to the idea that eating involves sitting still, or, for that matter, mealtimes. The perfectly-roasted rack of lamb would have been quite thrown on away on him, and on his parents as well, as his mother assured me. But thanks to unforeseen changes in the holiday plans of two of our oldest friends, we did not dine alone.

Exhausted by the foregoing paragraph, I have to go back to bed.

Tuesday, 27 December

The bed has been made, and the kitchen straightened out; the handyman has cleared out the bathtub that clogs up once a quarter at least. Kathleen is about to take the last of the calendars to a mailbox; they’re all stamped and ready to drop. In a few minutes, I’ll call the dry cleaner to summon our semi-weekly trade of dirty laundry for clean. It could not be more ordinary, what’s in store for today — which I hesitate to say, given the fact that the Fates are avid readers of this site and take a keen pleasure in “posting comments.” (By the way, comments are open, once again, at The Daily Blague. More about that some other time.)

Now, here’s how ordinary today is: I turn on the CD player and it picks up at the start of Mozart’s Horn Quintet, almost certainly his most disappointing chamber work. It’s not a chamber work, really, but just a stripped down horn concerto, so brainlessly breezy that it always sounds to me as if it’s about to veer into Ein Musikalischer Spass — that parody of the bubblegum music of Mozart’s time. Mozart was probably as incapable of writing such stuff as good writers are of turning out lucrative pornography (does anyone still read pornography?), but his musical joke captures the essence of hackery-quackery, and it makes us laugh at it.

At breakfast this morning, I read the excerpt of Pico Iyer’s memoir that appears in the November issue of Herper’s, “From Eden to Eton.” People seem to think that I know everything, but I did not know who Pico Iyer was until this morning. That’s to say, I didn’t know what his family background was. It seemed too improbable that a subcontinental father, no matter how learned would name his son after the great (and unread) Renaissance humanist, but that’s what happened. Also, there’s a reason why Iyer seems to have come from everywhere; at the age of nine or ten, he went back to the Dragon School at Oxford, after a year or so in Santa Barbara. I see that he was also the head of the Chess Club at Eton. Now, this is what I have in mind when I insist that I am an ill-educated lout.

Thursday, 29 December

The good thing about the colds that we catch from Will throughout the winter is that they don’t last as long as the the other kinds of colds — colds that we are glad to catch only rarely. Will’s colds come and go in three days. But the first day is usually pretty incapacitating. Being an ancient creature, I’ve learned that the surest way to recovery is to drop everything, stay home, watch videos, and order Chinese. And no email underf any circumstances! That’s what works for me. Kathleen went to work yesterday, and so she’s having a rather more incapacitating day today than I did yesterday. In a little while, I’m going out for a haircut.

I watched five movies. The first one was Get Low, which I’d bought on sale at the Video Room but never watched. This is the movie about the reclusive carpenter who wants to throw himself a funeral party that he can attend. Robert Duvall plays the old man, but the movie’s quirky tone is set entirely by Bill Murray, that master of plangent, unfunny comedy. I almost watched Winter’s Bone afterward, but instead I watched something with an actress who to my eye closely resembles Jennifer Lawrence.

All four movies, after Get Low, were in fact drawn from the same drawer of DVDs, which runs from M to P. First, I watched Nurse Betty, which I hadn’t seen in a long time. Then I watched an action movie in which Aaron Eckhart is as slick as he is sloppy in Nurse Betty: Paycheck, with Ben Affleck and Uma Thurman. This was followed by The Queen, also an action movie but utterly devoid of the mano a mano that clutters up Paycheck. Finally, a real drama: Quiz Show. Appalling to note: Quiz Show is nearly eighteen years old.

I suppose I ought to say a word about each of these movies. Renée Zellweger is astonishingly lovely in Nurse Betty, with her beautiful complexion and bewildered ingenuousness filling the screen like a perfectly-ripe peach. It’s fun to note the difference between her natural self and the persona that she puts on while in the fugue state occasioned by witnessing her husband’s murder. As “Nurse” Betty, she utters soap-opera banalities (“You said it to her, but you meant it for me”) with Shekespearian authority. Morgan Freeman’s character is, in contrast, a sentimental mess, something that the actor is almost capable of making us overlook. The day’s other movie about television, Quiz Show, is a requiem for dreams of the golden age of television, which never happened. Television was always bound to be crap, partly because of the advertising model, which poisons everything it touches, and partly because television flatters our overconfidence, making us feel that we understand things that we don’t understand at all. But lots of people had high hopes for it in the Fifties — “the largest classroom in the world.” (Education has stumbled so badly that this may indeed be true today.) Quiz Show reminds us that television never had much of a place for the Herb Stempels of the world.

You  may be surprised to read that I like Paycheck — every once in a while. I don’t care for all the fighting or car-chasing, and the “clever” plot does not bear much scrutiny. But Paycheck works as a video game that you don’t have to bother to play yourself; you can just watch and enjoy it. And things that are really wrong with the production — namely, Uma Thurman — keep things frosty.

There’s nothing to be said about The Queen that hasn’t been said already a million times: Helen Mirren is breathtaking, &c &c. By the time this last video was ending, Kathleen came home. What she always finds puzzling (and so do I) is Diana Spencer’s enormous popularity with ordinary people. We can only attribute it to sensibilities coarsened by — television.

Friday, 30 December

Perhaps it was premature to blame our illnesses on Will. They’ve settled in — a cold for me; and sore throat with attendant aches for Kathleen — and threaten to stay a while. We’re taking it easy, but there’s only so easy you can take it at this time of year, when, for example, friends have been invited to drop in on New Year’s Eve afternoon (that would be tomorrow). We could call everyone up and cancel, but we’re not that sick, and a few friends might find the Let Things Go look an interesting change.

I’ve spent the entire day reading. I’ve been reading a great deal, actually, which is very nice. Reading books, I mean. By books, I don’t mean printed books as opposed to ebooks; I mean books as opposed to magazine articles and Internet feeds. I’ve been marching through Jeremy Black’s George III, enjoying the odd bit of donnish humour, as in this remark about bad behavior among the Hanoverians, made of George’s father, Frederick.

As Frederick, however, did not become king, he left to his grandsons, George III’s numerous progeny, the task of recreating the monarchical habits associated with Charles II.

(What makes this funny is the satire of duty: tasks and monarchical habits were assiduously avoided by these gentlemen, crowned or not.) As I read along, I become more and more convinced that George is the present queen’s truest forebear; like him, she is shy but unshirking, modest but determined, and she knows her onions.

I have also read three smallish books that have been lying about for quite some time. I wasn’t in the mood to read any of them until this strangely blended season of holiday cheer and mourning, stretched out over a barrage of minor ailments and now this cold. (As to the mourning, the shock of my aunt’s unexpected death has not yet found its depth.) The first book, Michael Kimball’s extraordinary Us, I envisioned as an experimental downer, and regretted having been sold by its enthusiastic reception in the more interesting precincts of the literary Internet. That was before I read it, though. Once I began, I couldn’t stop. It took my a while to notice the typographical signals that differentiate Kimball’s recreation of the final chapter of his maternal grandparents’ lives from Kimball’s personal recollections, but the former is so fresh and simple and vigorously written that I was slow to realize that I was reading about elderly people. “Our bed was shaking and it woke me up afraid,” the book begins. What follows is a cordial distillate of the stream of consciousness into which medical emergency casts the victim’s nearest and dearest. Here is the husband in the hospital parking lot, distinguishing people in his situation from the hospital staff:

We looked anxious and walked fast. We were all hurrying into the hospital to see if there had been any change in our husband or wife or mother or father or son or daughter. We wanted to know if anything had happened to them while we were at home or asleep. We wanted to get up to their hospital room before they woke up or before they died.

It’s the kind of writing that makes Hemingway look baroque. I don’t think that I’ve ever seen the generality of mortality so clearly fractured by the prism of an individual’s particular experience.

Then I read Chester Brown’s Paying For It, the graphic memoir about getting satisfaction from prostitutes (and tipping nicely for the experience). So far as the story goes, I wound up wondering if the nearer degrees of the Asperger’s spectrum might very well range through a sizable chunk of the male population. But that’s not the point of Paying For It — the story, I mean. The point is the graphics, and the graphics, while austere, are illuminating. What they principally illuminate is the distortion of memory. You can tell what the narrator remembers by the number of frames that he allocates to each experience. The suspense of wondering what a prostitute will look like when she finally opens the door appears to be far more memorable than the boffo sex that did (or didn’t) follow. This makes sense: only adolescents believe that great sex is unforgettable. Or, rather, that it is ever anything more than “unforgettable” — once it’s over, that is. Although my carnal circuity (to use Nicholson Baker’s great phrase) is so different from Chester Brown’s that one of us might just as well have been a Martian, I found Paying For It to be an extremely interesting narrative of consciousness.

The third book was Chris Bachelder’s Abbott Awaits. I read Aaron Thier’s strongly favorable review in The Nation, and ordered the book from my local shop. Right there you see the problem, or at any rate I do: Abbott Awaits is one of the great novels of 2011, possibly of modern times, but I read about it in The Nation and had to order it. This is the kind of funny/poignant book that you’d think everyone would be cdrazy about. Maybe it’s a bit too spot-on.

To tell the truth, I’m not sure how much of a novel it is, seeing how congruent the eponymous character’s life is with the author’s. It makes more sense to see Abbott Awaits as a reconsideration of The Myth of Sisyphus. A very funny reconsideration, I hasten to add. In about 9o brief chapters, Bachelder captures the existential quandary of an average sensual humanist. We have seen this character many times before; he is usually the hero of any novel written by a “trade” novelist who happens to be a man, and the butt of countless jokes when the upscale novelist is a woman (Alison Lurie, say). Here is the gamut of his character, from this —

Abbott has never told his wife this — he’s never told anyone — but he has a vision of himself as a father who, in the most gentle and loving and supportive way, corrects his children’s grammar. At the dinner table, say, buttering a roll and explaining, affably, the uses of lie and lay, for instance, or which and that. His intention is certainly not to demean or humiliate, and neither is it simply to instruct, really, but to share his passion and respect for the amazing system of English, its intricate rules and odd expressions.

— to this —

Abbott’s wife, inside the house, comes to the kitchen window below the section of the gutter that Abbott is cleaning. Her face in the window is level with his thighs, so naturally he imagines her sucking his penis and swallowing his semen.

It’s that “naturally” that clinches the portrait. The thing about these guys is that they are never sufficiently engaged by any job (other than polishing their egos) to let the slightest possibility of getting their rocks off go unsniffed. But that is not the particular Sisyphean fate that interests Bachelder. Fatherhood is, in its modern parenting phase. I’m not sure that Abbott Awaits is the book that progressive and intelligent new parents ought to be reading, but it is certainly all about them. And that’s how Bachelder comes up with an answer to life’s questions that’s somewhat brighter than Camus’s. For most exhausted and demoralized parents, it is despair that drowns in the bathtub, not the baby.

1 January 2012

The beginning of the new year would seem to be the ideal raison d’être for a fresh blog entry, but Kathleen and I remain mired in our respective ailments. This morning, I awoke so tired that I feared I must have reached the final hours of my life. But after an hour in my chair, spent discharging the night’s effluvia, I felt well enough to go back to bed and sleep some more. By noon, I felt more like someone with a bad cold than an impending corpse. Kathleen’s fever still dances around 100º, and of course we’ll have to call the doctor first thing Tuesday if this goes on.

We watched Radio Days last night, but that was our only New Year’s Eve observance (an annual tradition since shortly after the film came out, in 1986). There was no caviar, no champagne, no standing on the balcony listening to the revels and the fireworks. We had a happy time of it nonetheless. I’m delighted to have made it into 2012. 2011 wasn’t so much a bad or a hard year as a seemingly endless continuation of the “year” that began in October 2009, when I rolled up my sleeves and resolved to master my household. Since that may not sound like much of a challenge, I’ll tell you the story.

Way back in the Eighties, when I ought to have been arranging our domestic affairs (an undertaking that involves uncluttered closets, realistic budgets, and all the 0ther things that self-help books talk about, but also a lot more, stuff that you have to figure out for yourself, because your household is as intimate as your personal hygiene), Kathleen and I bought a country house instead. This gave us unlimited room for growth, as it were. When, about ten years later, the folly of running two households became impossible to ignore, we sold the house and filled a large storage unit with its contents — all but the furniture, which we simply got rid of.

This was my second chance to master my material posssessions, but instead I found another, if worthier distraction: the Internet. I launched a Web site. Then, a few years later, the antecedent of this very blog. I gave householding no more attention than absolutely necessary.

If there was a breakdown or crisis in 2009, I don’t remember it, but I remember waking up to the awareness that I couldn’t live like this anymore. Why, for example, did I maintain such an extensive batterie de cuisine if I hardly ever cooked? When was that loveseat, last reupholstered by my father in a material that neither Kathleen nor I could bear to look at, hidden by an increasingly tattered slipcover, going to be made truly presentable? What was the point of storing so many framed pictures? These are only three of a hundred such questions, all of them insistent and annoying.

When you are young, you believe that you can simply throw everything away and start over. This is like believing that you can lose twenty pounds and keep in shape. A lucky few get to pull it off, but for most of us the more realistic course is to avoid accumulating the excess. If you are the sort of person who is inclined to believe that almost anything will come in handy — a romantic delusion encouraged by reading, at too tender an age, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe — this will be difficult. You may easily find it easier to maintain your youthful waistline than to keep your closets in good shape. (And by “good shape,” I mean the state in which, when you’re in need of something, you know right where it is, and all you have to do is open the closet door and reach for it.) The worst thing about being young is that you have no sense of how likely something is to come in handy — handy to you. You don’t know who you are when you are young. You only know who you want to be. That said, I wish that I’d buckled down to the job in my mid-thirties.

There is another cruel fact of life that is even more difficult to learn: Nobody wants your stuff. Aside from the odd objet de vertu that prompts people very rudely to ask you to leave it to them in your will, nothing that you own is of any real value to anyone else, especially if you life in a relatively affluent society of fungible goods. Lets say that there’s a “market” for my collections of books, CDs, and videos — and it’s by no means certain that there is — there remains no end of other kinds of items that you’ve probably piled up in such large heaps that it’s not worth anybody’s time to search for valuable nuggets. I’m talking about mementoes — scrapbooks and yearbooks and photo albums and shoeboxes full of photographs, recipe cards, letters, clippings — and when you get to be my age you begin to wonder how much longer these things will be interesting to you.

At least this blog doesn’t take up too much physical space.

The early months of 2012 will undoubtedly see a continuation of this tedious, painstaking project. But I can say with assurance that there is a great deal less to be done than there was in October 2009. It’s conceivable that, next January, I’ll be celebrating a new year in earnest. 

The tree was supple and easy to decorate. It was also full without being expansive. Owing to attrition, we haven’t got many ornaments this year. (Kathleen’s priceless old ones are never used when the tree stands in the foyer. I may yet persuade her to risk one or two.) I am halfways through the Christmas-card list, and thanks to several sheets of self-stick $1 stamps, I can mail our calendar packages without further trips to the Post Office. Only two things remain: planning Christmas Eve dinner and buying some presents for Will. I hope to have knocked both items off my list before the end of the day.

***

Nicholas Dunbar’s The Devils Derivatives is not an easy book to read. It’s fluent, so far as narrative goes, but it is not shy of difficult concepts. And I still haven’t figured out quite what a “mattress” is. But a clearer-than-ever picture is developing in my mind; I can see the steps that the would-be wizards of Wall Street (working in Europe, for the most part) took to diminish the appearance of risk in order to “hoover up nickels,” as Robert Merton put it. (Or was it Myron Scholes?) The governing idea seems to have been the erection of trading platforms so immense — capable of supporting so many bets — that moderately dodgy investment vehicles would take on the rosy blush of investment grade. At some point, one or both of two things happened: greed made the traders (and the salesmen) disoriented — I keep thinking that they got something like the bends in their pursuit of higher bonuses — and the trading platforms coalesced into one hypercolossal platform, with all correlations set to 1. I’m writing this off the top of my head as an aide-memoire: I hope, re-reading it in the near future, to be able to spot every error in this paragraph.

***

What if someone had told me, when I was a little boy, always on the lookout for presents (was I ever), that I’d have much more fun when I grew up and became a grandfather and got to buy them instead? What would I have made of that? I’d have thought that it was the usual adult palaver, to which almost all wisdom seemed reducible, the most concrete version of which was “a penny saved is a penny earned,” which, by the way, is utter nonsese, since, unless it was stolen, the penny has presumably been earned already. No one did say, it however — no one ever thought to tell me how much fun I’d have when I got to be a grandfather, and could visit a toystore, such as Kidding Around, and buy more or less everything on my list, and then some.

I did take heart, though, from Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Looking Forward.”

When I am grown to man’s estate
I shall be very proud and great,
And tell the other girls and boys
Not to meddle with my toys.

Oh, exactly. That, I got. And so now I’ve got a lot of toys to hand on to Will.

That’s how I’ve always thought of myself: reasonable, but not rational. Reasonable at best, perhaps, but never rational. I weigh and consider, as Bacon put it so well, but I never process. Now Daniel Kahneman has written a book claiming that almost everybody is just like me. He adds, though, that it may be unreasonable not to master a certain degree of statistical competence, for use in making high-stakes decisions.

We will draw a veil across the high-stakes decisions that, in retrospect, I clearly bungled. It’s holiday season, no time for moping.

One of the findings that Kahneman works with is called loss aversion; the simple-minded understanding of this principle that I’ve carried away from my reading of Thinking, Fast and Slow is that it takes $2.0o in gains to offset the pain of $1.00 in losses. The prospect of winning two dollars is as attractive as the prospect of losing a dollar is unattractive. Most of us live sounder lives because of this highly conservative outlook.

Well, no sooner do I finish Kahneman’s book than I pick up Nicholas Dunbar’s The Devil’s Derivatives, the first chapter of which describes a gaggle of bonus-happy bankers as the men who like to win. What this means, we’re told, is that these are (young) men whose aversion to losses is negligible. For them, the appeal of a bet to win $2.00 is so great that it will overpower the dread of losing $2,000,000. I exaggerate, but you get the picture. Dunbar reminds us that bankers used to be extremely loss averse. Their outlook changed, however, when the very nature of risk was recast, starting in the 1990s, in fancy formulas, some of them devised by actual rocket scientists. The bankers didn’t understand the formulas, of course, but they liked the whopping revenues that the more daring young men, such as Peter Merriwether, were piling up. The money was literally intoxicating.

“Intoxicating” is a serious word, like “terrible,” that is often used frivolously. Nowadays, to make sure that the point that I just tried to make gets across, you have to say, “the money was toxic.” But of course that elides the component of thrilling fun that bankers had on the way to the graveyard.  It also misses the point that bankers gave up being reasonable because they thought they were being rational.

 

After all, I did go to Carnegie Hall last night to hear Messiah. We didn’t stay until the end, because we’d never have gotten a decent dinner if we had. None of the restaurants that we likes keeps the kitchen going after eleven anymore (New York has certainly become the City That Gets Its Beauty Rest), so we took after “I Know That My Redeemer Liveth” (sung a tad harshly by Emalie Savoy). We didn’t like leaving early, but we hadn’t been mesmerized, or at least I hadn’t. Kent Tritle’s direction went for lovely, light-handed clarity of texture, but at the expense, I thought, of the occasional impressive choral boom that reminds you what this music is about. And there had been muddles.

It would have been nice, for example, if I’d brought the tickets. I still had them at home, although I didn’t think to look. I thought that I had sent Kathleen off with them in the morning. But she had taken the wrong envelope — the one containing tickets for the Oratorio Society’s April performance (Dvorak’s Stabat Mater). We found this out as we were heading up to our box seats. (Box seats! I hadn’t sat in a box seat in Carnegie Hall since the last Philharmonic season there, when I was 14 or so.) The ticket-taker sent us packing to the box office, where correct tickets were issued on the spot, as soon as my name was confirmed on a list of Oratorio Society subscribers. I’d heard about such marvels from Fossil Darling, but I’d never had to test them.

The muddle might have been much worse. In the middle of the afternoon, before I’d made my mind up one way or the other, Kathleen called to say that the parents of an associate were desperate for tickets, and, much as she herself wanted to go, she’d rather give the tickets to people who really wanted them than go alone. I fastened on what I knew to be Kathleen’s genuine desire to hear Messiah at Christmas, and asked for an hour to decide. In that time, I threw on some street clothes, walked up to Staples for some mailing envelopes, came home, walked over to the Post Office to mail the cards-and-calendars that I’d already stuffed (the line was daunting, but it moved quickly), and come home again. And I felt pretty good. The air had cleared in my head a bit. Partly, it had been the exercise. Partly, though, it had been the surprising moment when, thinking of the aria that I mentioned above, I began to weep, right in the street.

Indeed, the first half of Messiah (in Mozart’s arrangement, which I’d never heard live before) served as a kind of Requiem for my aunt — a private service for just me, right there in Carnegie Hall. (This is what Kathleen has in mind when she says how appropriate it is that I was born on the Feast of the Three Kings.) As the tenor, a pleasing Aaron Blake, intoned the opening words, “Comfort Ye,” my tears welled up again, and they kept flowing through the first chorus. They bubbled up for the last time during the Pastoral Symphony. By the time the first part of the oratorio came to and, I was deeply happy about having come. And I was especially relieved that the associate’s parents hadn’t been presented with a very unpleasant booby prize when they tried to get into the hall.

After the interval, there was another muddle. It turned out that the young lady in the front corner seat of our box who was visibly attached to a young man in the adjacent box was (surprise) sitting in the wrong seat. The actual ticketholder, a forty-ish gent in a tux who looked like a knocked-down Robin Williams, not only fussed about his seat, but he helped himself to the program from my chair when he went to take it. He wore, according to Kathleen, who was stuck right behind him, some very cheap cologne. But the worst of it was that he was, tout court, an asshole. Throughout the second half of the performance, he engaged in dumbshow conversation with someone, unseen by us, in another box. During Mary Phillips’s somewhat underpowered rendition of “He Was Despised,” our natty neighbor mimed an ostentatious yawn. Later, after some squeak in the chorus that you had to want to notice, he stuck a finger in his ear as if to clean it out. I’ve never seen such behavior! It may make me sound like May Robson to say so, but I’ll say it again: I’ve never seen such behavior. As he sat directly in front of Kathleen, his bobbing and weaving — every now and then, he had to lean out over the edge of the balcony, looking for I shudder to think what — made it impossible for Kathleen to watch the performance without plenty of bobbing and weaving of her own. We werent very hard into Part II of Messiah before my thoughts were distracted entirely from the the music by the thought of tapping the jerk on the shoulder and insisting that he sit still. (Indeed the only number that held my complete attention was Kevin Deas’s fierce complaint about raging nations and vain imaginings.)

Decamping early for dinner seemed, then, doubly wise.

There is always so much to be learned about photography. Red-eye is bad enough. Red velvet hands? What I’m really showing off here is the happy accident that Civil Pleasures, my second Web site and still more in development than it ought to be four years after launching, looks just right on the Kindle Fire without any further fiddling.

***

Watching The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex last night gave new meaning to the phrase “in like Flynn.” The 1939 Warners classic, which I’d never seen before, turns out to be almost perfectly cast. Just as Elizabeth put the stability of England ahead of personal glory, something that Essex couldn’t seem to imagine doing, so Bette Davis put the dramatic interest of the motion picture ahead of personal vanity, which couldn’t have occurred to Errol Glynn. Ethan Mordden writes that Flynn “was at his best when he let his natural charm show through” — in other words, when he stopped acting. Of Elizabeth and Essex, Mordden writes, “Flynn thinks it’s a Flynn vehicle, and he hurts the film by not refusing to respond to Davis.” Just as Essex hurt England with his vainglorious march on London. Well, “hurt” is perhaps overstatement. Neither the aristocrat nor the actor was truly significant personage in his line of work, although both were of course very popular for a spell. uy

I’ve been re-reading The Hollywood Studios: House Style in the Golden Age of the Movies (Knopf, 1988), and enjoying it to pieces. Beginning with Paramount and MGM, Mordden writes engaging, conversational chapters about each of the Majors (and one about the Independents as well), sifting through the moguls, the stars, and the properties to identify the characteristics that distinguished the overall output of each. What, for example, made RKO different? First of all, it was founded in 1928, at the dawn of the Talkies. It couldn’t have learned anything about making movies from the long experience that the other studios had. No wonder the studio was the first to go, bought about by Desilu in 1957.

Among other things, House Style (as I call it) is a very funny book.

Today it is common to think of Hepburn as a natural, even as inevitable. But when she was new she was thought strange-looking, affected, and possibly nutty. Hollywood likes outstanding versions of the norm, not outstanding versions of the outstanding, and the non-conformist Hepburn, blurting out The Oddest Things to the press, dodging photographers, and failing to be spotted on the right arm at the orthodox places, acted as strangely as she looked.

She played strange roles, too, no one like another: and played them not as if the studio made her do so but because she wanted to. How to get a handle on this woman? In Christopher Strong (1933) she is Lady Cynthia Darrington, a world-famous aviatrix. The very noun itself bespeaks a pride of glamour. But Hepburn shows up in silver lamé sheath with a Dracula collar and antennae. Maybe it’s supposed to suggest Garbo, but it makes Hepburn look like a Martian lounge singer.

As they say, LOL. I don’t know when I’ve enjoyed re-reading a book so much. Of course I feel terribly guilty, indulging in such pleasures when the house is bursting with unread new books. I can’t have known, back in 1988, that House Style would be one of the most important books in my collection, to me I mean, but that’s unfortunately how libraries work. You have to hold on to everything, because you don’t know what you’ll regret letting go.

Rereading the book prompted me to have another look at Grand Hotel and Dinner at Eight (1932 and 1933 respectively, and both MGM. They were both signature offerings, the one of Irving Thalberg and the other of David O Selznick, and they are both haunted by silent-screen habits that won’t go away. Lionel Barrymore plays dying men in both films, but that’s all the characters have in common; Dinner‘s Oliver Jordan is an admirably modest gent, but Grand Hotel‘s Otto Kringelein is a whining, wheedling clerk who never shuts up. He would go over much better, and in fact be the figure of sorrow and pity that he is, if we couldn’t hear him. In the same film, there are times when it would better if we couldn’t hear Joan Crawford, too. She’s still a pretty girl here, but she sounds like a defective Eliza Doolittle, too much of this and too little of that. Too many of her takes seem designed to announce winning poker hands. As for Garbo, she doesn’t need the silver lamé or the antenna to look like a Martian lounge singer on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Only John Barrymore, ham that he was, seems to know where movies were going, and is capable for film’s natural tendency to overstate everything.

I’ve never cared much for Jean Harlow, possibly because, like Joan Crawford, she’d have done better at Warner’s (as Crawford certainly did). What I learned from Ethan Mordden is that the studios’ different styles could be the making of an actor. It took MGM to make an outstanding normal woman of Katharine Hepburn, for example. Jean Harlow might have been funnier if she’d made more movies with James Cagney, say. Instead, at brighly-lighted MGM, she’s just vulgar, a mannequin for bias-cut satin nightgowns. And she’s sad, too — she died so very young (26). Marie Dressler, on the other hand, is a revelation: now I know where Angela Lansbury comes from.

***

Now, to finish Daniel Kahneman. A blurb on the dust jacket, contributed by Nicholas Nassim Taleb, ranks Thinking, Fast and Slow with The Wealth of Nations and Freud’s The Interpretation of Drams, and I wholeheartedly agree. Like the earlier books, Thinking completely upsets a widely-held idea, in this case that “man is a rational animal.” I hope that someone is already at work on an elementary-school curriculum that is based on Kahneman’s conclusions. For one thing, we all need much more basic training in statistics, and the whole field of arithmetic ought to be reconceived accordingly. Second, young minds ought to be shaped, to the extent that they can be, by an awareness of the biases toward overconfidence and bad decisions that are Kahneman’s book’s crown of thorns.

 

Typical. The minute I feel restored to 3D by Remicade, I run around like a crazy person trying to do everything that was left undone during the previous fortnight. The result is as much a part of the rhythm of my life as the infusion itself: a day in bed. Ordinarily, I’m someone who likes to get out of bed. I may not be so keen on standing up and thinking, but staying in bed has become unappealing. This morning, I did not so much wake up as drift into a remake of Greta Garbo’s bedroom scenes in Grand Hotel (which I watched yesterday), only I was happy and perfectly content. While Kathleen read the paper, I sank in and out of dreams that were alarming simply because of their alternaty: at one point, I was pushing a grocery cart, clueless, at Fairway. What was I shopping for? What was I doing in Fairway? Even less pleasant was trying to take a sip from my water bottle: only in my dream was I holding it. I came to with a shudder.

I scratched my plans for the day, which were pretty ambitious. I was going to go to the movies, visit a toy store, and round up the holiday paraphernalia at the storage unit. Instead, I think that I’ll go back to bed.

***

But first, a word or two about Kurt Anderson’s Vanity Fair piece about the failure of style to change over the  past twenty-plus years. This is something that I’d noticed myself. I came to the conclusion, voiced but not fully endorsed by Anderson, that we’ve been too preoccupied by the overhaul in our personal lives wrought by digital technology that we haven’t had much appetite for superficial change.

In some large measure, I think, it’s an unconscious collective reaction to all the profound nonstop newness we’re experiencing on the tech and geopolitical and economic fronts. People have a limited capacity to embrace flux and strangeness and dissatisfaction, and right now we’re maxed out. So as the Web and artificially intelligent smartphones and the rise of China and 9/11 and the winners-take-all American economy and the Great Recession disrupt and transform our lives and hopes and dreams, we are clinging as never before to the familiar in matters of style and culture.

But Anderson is happier, it seems to me, with a declinist reading of the matter: “After all, such a sensibility shift has happened again and again over the last several thousand years, that moment when all great cultures—Egyptian, Roman, Mayan, Islamic, French, Ottoman, British—slide irrevocably into an enervated late middle age.” There’s a fallacy here that is only beginning to be noticed by historians, who have come to see it as part of their déformation professionelle: the inclination to anthropomorphize cultures, to speak of them in terms of youth, vigorous prime, and decrepitude. What’s really being done is this: slices of the past are being weighed for their interest to us. Were the affluent families of the later Roman Empire and the dawning European kingdoms sensible of living in fallen times? I rather doubt it; on the contrary, they were preoccupied by the big new thing, which was Christianity, not only as a personal faith (a new idea in itself) but as a social network. Until very recently, historians have not found anything about Christianity as a social network to be interesting, not least because most they’ve grown up in an era of Christian retreat from intellectual life. But now we’re learning that we have a tendency to identify as robust those cultures that get to push other cultures around. Not so great. And while there are certainly periods in history of great catastrophe, they don’t appear on cue, in the order proposed by Thomas Cole’s suite of Course of Empire paintings.

Anyway, it struck me this morning that the simplest explanation is that the locus of change has shifted, from stuff to circuits, and that we have been taken through several  booming cycles of style change by the guys who set style today: tech nerds. Why, they’re not even nerds anymore! They’re usually pretty hip. But they’re private about their stuff. (And, as closet libertarians, they’re fairly apolitical as well.) The only thing that they want to share is the newest wrinkle in the technological fabric. Because this is their time in the sun — well, we’ve put them there — they make sure that we’re all caught up in the frenzy. Our social network congregates at the Apple Store.

Last night, Will’s parents used their Night Out to buy a Christmas tree. “Oh, wow!” said Will — but that was before he’d even seen it. He is very into saying “Oh, wow!” these days; it is the new “Uh-oh!” He seemed to like the tree, but it was probably a bit too much to take in, having a fir in the apartment. What he took to immediately was the length of twine in which the boughs were bound for easy carrying. As soon as it was cut free, he began a new career of doing a million things with it. He trailed it behind him; he wound himself up in it; he even tried to do the adult thing, and loop it into a ring. (The result was an incarnation of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.) I could see why Geekdad hailed string as one of the five great toys.

Then he decided to dress up. This was new to me. I did not crop his head out of the image above; I was trying to take a picture of his footwear, borrowed from his father and, more clearly that the photograph suggests, worn on the wrong feet. When he put the green Santa hat on, he looked like one of the Chinese mushrooms in Fantasia — and also, as his father said, like a little Harry Potter. For the time being, Will doesn’t need a wand to be wowed.

***

Earlier in the day, my dear aunt died, in New Hampshire. I have little to say about her passing beyond slandering the local medical profession; I thought that we were past the time when you could die of complications attending appendicitis. I’ll get over all of that. Because she lived in one of the most inaccessible parts of the Northeast, and I no longer drive (Kathleen never did), we hadn’t paid a visit recently, and I never got to show off Will. A minor regret, really — about Will, I mean. My aunt gave me something utterly priceless, even though it would have embarrassed her to hear tell of it. If I hadn’t adored her as a boy, I might not have recognized as quickly as I did Kathleen’s similar combination of smarts, chic, and kindness. And where would I be in that case?

***

The sun hasn’t come out this morning. It looks like a good day for staying home, which is what I intend, grateful for the empty calendar, to do.

Yesterday, I abandoned myself to the uttermost dissolution. I had a long lunch with Ray Soleil, and then we watched two old movies — and, just like that, it was time for dinner! The two movies that we watched were both in black-and-white, made within three years of one another, and shot heavily (exclusively, in one case) on location in Manhattan. They were also, both of them, odd fish. “Offbeat” would have been the non-committal judgment of the time. The one was not quite a comedy, and the other not quite a horror movie.

They were Love With the Proper Stranger and Seconds, respectively. I saw Seconds when it was new, in 1966. Several times. It freaked me out completely. You may know the story. A middle-aged banker (John Randolph) gets mysterious phone calls from a college friend whom he knows to be dead. A stranger tails him through Grand Central Terminal — this is the opening scene — and hands him a slip of paper with an address written on it. Eventually, he goes to the address, in pursuit of a new life as a “reborn.” With a dispatch that brings Ray Bradbury to mind, the banker is drugged, set up for blackmail, and forced to sign his estate over to “the company,” which, in addition to rejuvenating him with extensive plastic surgery (as Ray said, viewers were more naive in the Sixties, and would have believed that this was possible), will stage the banker’s death (with help from “cadaver procurement services”) and see that his wife and daughter were comfortably provided for. After a few fade-outs, the banker emerges as Rock Hudson, and is shipped off to California for his new life. If you don’t know the story, skip to the end of the paragraph, while I wrap up this summary. The new life doesn’t take; notwithstanding the charms of Salome Jens, Rock Hudson is even more bored and unsettled than John Randolph was. He winds up, of course, in “CPS.”

John Frankenheimer directed Seconds, and the movie shares a lot, from the auteurist point of view, with The Manchurian Candidate, made a few years earlier and also featuring the ghoulishly genial Khigh Dhiegh, born Kenneth Dickerson in Spring Lake, New Jersey, in 1910. (Isn’t IMDb great? But how do you say “Khigh Dhiegh”? Ah. “Ky Dee.” If you say so.) In many anxious scenes, Randolph or Hudson sits in a corner of the foreground, eyes moving dramatically, while someone else talks in the background. In Randoph’s case, the background figure is usually explaining the reborn program. In Hudson’s best scene, the standing figure is Frances Reid, playing the banker’s widow, who has, of course, no idea that the man to whom she is describing the emptiness of her marriage is in fact her husband. John Randolph, who had a far more interesting life than the banker — born Emanuel Cohen in the Bronx, five years after Khigh Dhiegh and blacklisted after pleading the Fifth Amendment bofore the HUAC — is hands down the better actor. But Rock Hudson’s woodenness is relieved by a discomfiture that is not at all out of place. Seconds is an occasion for Roy Scherer, Jr, born in Winnetka in 1925, and a closeted homosexual who would be felled by AIDS, to put the phoniness of his life in front of the camera, and he makes the most of the opportunity.

I hadn’t seen Love With the Proper Stranger before. Ray had “sold” it to me at lunch a while back, and, unable to rent a copy, I’d bought one. Robert Mulligan’s film captures a moment that I remember well, although I didn’t know that it was a moment at the time; nor did I know any big, possessive Italian families. There was a feeling, in the early Sixties, that New York City was simply no longer “modern.” Most of its buildings looked ancient, no matter how few decades back they’d been built, and most of its citizens were immured in powerful networks of traditional families. California was modern, Denver was modern, but New York was old-hat. And the young people of New York restlessly decided to do something about it, although nothing that would involve going without a necktie or a headscarf.

There’s a glancing, anticlimatic quality to the story. The dramatic event has already taken place, and one of the participants has almost forgotten about it. Now, at the start of the film, Angie Rossini is telling Rocky Papasano, a trumpeter who’s milling about in a casting call, that she’s pregnant. She needs the name of “a doctor.” Is this funny? It is, sort of. Natalie Wood is very cute, an adorable damsel in distress, not least because she never whines — not in front of Rocky, anyway. Steve McQueen is peculiarly inarticulate; in lieu of speech, he vibrates and rumbles and looks down to the ground as if in search of clues about what to do next. That’s kind of adorable, too, especially once you know that he’s going to do the decent thing. And then, after the grim enocunter with the abortionist — a scene that ever right-to-lifer ought to be obliged to re-enact — he does the right thing, although it takes a little while. In the course of scraping up the money for the “doctor,” the young people spend enough time together to get the idea that their marriage would not be tantamount to going back to the old ways and living with a dozen relatives underfoot. Angie’s little apartment is in Greenwich Village, but it’s bright and well-ordered, unlike the overupholstered layrinth that her brothers share with her mother, and less unlike the breezily shabby flat where Rocky is camping out with Barbie (Edie Adams), a Broadway babe.

The movie’s goofy finale nails it to its time. In a last-ditch effort to win Angie, Rocky apes the odball, still unfamiliar, faintly ridiculous gambit of behaving like a sign-carrying protestor. In the middle of the day, he stands on 34th Street, waiting for Angie’s lunch break at Macy’s. “Better Wed Than Dead,” his sign reads. As the camera pulls back from a throng of New Yorkers, our eyes are caught by the hugging, kissing younsters whose understatement and light touch promises to freshen up the place.

***

On Friday, I saw My Week With Marilyn, and it’s a very good movie in spite of the fact that, the more you think about it afterward, the less it seems to have to do with Marilyn Monroe. Michelle Williams is truly captivating in the role of Marilyn, but that’s just another way of saying that she upstages the actual actress whose films we know so well. She makes you forget that Marilyn Monroe was not a genuinely voluptuous woman. She could put on the pose and pretend, but that’s what made her a comedienne: you got to laugh with her at the pose. Naturally, she was restless and edgy. She was not incapable of relaxation but she was never (on film) self-possessed, composed. There was a rigid quality about her being at rest, as if she were afraid to muss a curl of her hair or the drape of her dress. Michelle Williams, in contrast, can do almost anything without moving. She is always centered so deeply in herself that she seems in possession of dangerous special powers. Marilyn’s powers were strictly WYSIWYG. What’s hard for Michelle Williams to pull off is Marilyn’s incompetence as an actress. Her performance hints at deep psychic wounds, but Marilyn Monroe, on the evidence, was a noodle who needed a very firm dancing partner in order to cross a room. Michelle Williams makes Marilyn Monroe a million times more glamorous than she really was.

But that’s all right, because My Week With Marilyn is not about Marilyn Monroe but about the guy who had the week with her. This would be Colin Clark, the very well-brought-up son of Sir Kenneth Clark, of Civilisation fame. Colin Clark was (is) Edith Wharton’s only godson; she left him half of her library. How’s that for an ordinary bloke who gets lucky? The point of it all is that Colin is no ordinary bloke, and luck (aside from the luck of birth) has nothing to do with the case. Clark works his way into the production of a motion picture by dint of his excellent resources. He has magnificent, yea, regal connections to call upon as a gofer. Instead of belaboring Clark’s advantages, the movie exploits them as magic tricks. Eddie Redmayne is perfect in the part, because he has a constitutional reluctance to call attention to himself that’s beautifully harnessed to an ability to put himself in the center of any scene. The vulgar word is “class.” His Clark has so much class that we wonder Marilyn Monroe didn’t write a memoir entitled, My Week With Colin. Well, we know why Marilyn didn’t. But we’re inclined to believe that Michelle Williams might.

The fun of My Week With Marilyn is Kenneth Branagh’s recreation of Laurence Olivier, which is as spot-on as his costar’s is (no less delightfully) wide of the mark. Mr Branagh has been haunted by Olivier throughout his career, and we can only hope that it will be an equally long one. The difficulty is that he is nowhere near the insidious ham that Olivier was, nor does he radiate the pixie-ish suggestion that was implicit in Olivier’s slightest gesture: Olivier was inconceivable offscreen. He might as well have been made of celluloid, so embodied in film is he. Not Mr Branagh. Kenneth Branagh is a great actor, but he is meatily mortal.

In the end, My Week With Marilyn is one of the better movies about the movies. Superficially about the making of a movie, it is in fact about its actual stars. What does Judi Dench “do” with Sybil Thorndike? What do they all “do,” these impersonators? What do we do, when we watch them? What we do is say “Yes.” When Marilyn, about to be mobbed by the kitchen staff at Windsor Castle — to which Colin has gained admittance because his godfather (Derek Jacobi) is the royal librarian — asks “Shall I be her?”, we don’t wait for Colin to answer. We say, “Yes, Michelle. Be her. Be Marilyn.” And then, right before our eyes, she does.

It may take so long to get going today that it will be tomorrow before I make the bed, get dressed, and do all the other ordinary morning things. It will probably be Wednesday when I get out of bed on the early side again.

Today’s low, vitiated mood is perfectly normal for the eve of a Remicade infusion (I’m to have one tomorrow), but there’s an overlay of quite objective sadness: my dear aunt is in hospice care. The sadness takes me by surprise at least once an hour, by crystallizing into jagged-edged grief.

So I’m not good for much today. Attempting to sparkle would probably be regrettable.

In the taxi that carried us home, the driver got off his cell phone. We were still on Sixth Avenue, but about to turn right toward the East Side. “It’s cold,” the driver said, in a robust voice, his accent vaguely South Asian. We didn’t respond right away, so he almost turned in his seat to address us. “It’s cold,” he said, again. We agreed. “Where do you live?” he asked. We wondered to ourselves, “How many people who get into a taxi in the Village somewhere between nine and ten in the evening, and who ask to be taken to 86th and Second (which every driver in the world remembers as “82nd and Second, but that’s another story, even though this one did, too) — how many such people don’t live there,” but all we said was “Here.” “You look like tourists,” the driver said blandly, as though pleased to have made a mistake. “You look like tourists to me.” The only thing that I could think of to say to this was, ‘We’ve lived in the same building for thirty years.” This he found astonishing, although not violently so. The driver was much too friendly, and self-possessed in a childlike way, for violence. Recovering from his strangely friendly assault, I thought of something better than living in the same building for thirty years, much better. “I was born here,” I said. This got more of a reaction. “That’s right,” I said, swelling inside, “right on West 65th Street.” I was so flushed with pride, it was like a treatment at a spa.

***

Paul Rudnick is never coming to my house. Oh no no no no no! If he did, I’m sure that I would hear the “gay voice” that torments a Midwestern housewife in his skit, The Gay Agenda, when her new neighbors, the same-sex couple Bill and Stu, come to return an apple crumble pan (or is it blueberry?). They claim to admire her living room, with its tasteful colonial reproductions and plaid wallpaper, but Mary Abigail (a fantastically funny Harriet Harris) can hear, as if spoken aloud, what they must really be thinking. “This is where Betty Crocker shot herself!” It is the funniest, funniest, funniest moment in the entire history of theatre, or at least that’s what it feels like right now. I’m still laughing the next morning. Later in the evening, in another Rudnick skit, there was a joke that was almost as good, in its unlikely and unexpected comic fit: a matchmaking mother tells her son about a cardiac surgeon whom she has imagined for the purposes of one-upping a rival mom. The surgeon operates exclusively on gay children in third world countries — he’s that gay. “But how does he know they’re gay?” asks the son, of the children. It’s Ms Harris again, and she gives Mark Consuelos (did you see the smile on him?) a Jack Benny look. “Because their hearts are so big.” It’s a terrible joke, really, but that’s why it fits the circumstances so well. The creator of Libby Gelman-Waxner has done himself proud.

There are plenty of laughs in the other pieces that have been gathered together to compose Standing On Ceremony: The Gay Marriage Plays, but they’re different from the laughs that Paul Rudnick incites. They’re the kind of laughs that you have, if you’re very lucky, during a wedding toast or a funeral speech. They’re rueful. They’re rueful for two reasons, or maybe two aspects of the same reason. Marriage isn’t for everyone, but everyone who gets married is just like everyone else who gets married in the same way that all of us are mortal. The frightful desperation of bridezillas everywhere is an annoying attempt to stand out while standing in line. Not to worry, though, because, by the same rueful token, weddings are a kind of blender that produces a slightly different drink for every couple, consisting of the odd mix of family and friends that show up, expecting to have a wonderful time. And almost every happy marriage ends with one spouse burying the other — how’s that for a reward?

Our reward was hearing Richard Thomas (yes, that Richard Thomas; he has grown up to be a pillar of the New York stage) deliver a eulogy to a lover, dead of pancreatic cancer after forty-six years of amiable argument about whether humanity has ceased to evolve. Moisés Kaufman packs a lot of material into the speech — the men met on the day Kennedy was shot; they saw the Twin Towers fall from the doorway of the DMV — and he even offers a deft acknowledgment that gay marriage is not an unmixed blessing, but Mr Thomas works through it all with the diligence of a heartsick left-behind gentleman that the illusion is complete: you may not have known Paul Foster, the deceased, but you’re at his funeral because you know people who knew him, and you mourn him. You mourn this imaginary man, and pity his survivor, as deeply as you would mourn all but your very nearest and dearest — and, who knows, maybe as much as them. And the moral of the story is that even though Paul and the nice man eulogizing him didn’t get married, they were married, and we recognize this at Paul’s funeral. There is no other word for the relationship. And our grief crowns the moral of the evening, which is that humanity has evolved, at least in part, sufficiently to recognize that all good people, regardless of sexual preference, have the right to get married. Perhaps it is marriage that has done the evolving, but that’s not much of a difference.

Craig Bierko, Polly Draper, and Beth “As We Stumble Along” Leavel round out the cast of six. Mr Bierko also delivers a eulogy, but it happens to be a device in Neil LaBute’s little melodrama, Strange Fruit. Ms Draper and Ms Leavel get to play two versions of the same couple in skits by Mo Gaffney and Wendey MacLeod, but they’re also sparring partners in Doug Wright’s On Facebook, an exercise in modern mis-manners that is significantly relieved by Ms Draper’s velvety bass0 profundo. There are ten plays in the Standing on Ceremony suite, nine of which are given on any one night. So we missed Joe Keenan’s This Marriage Is Saved, which is almost enough to make me think of going back.

***

I was born in New York City under shameful circumstances: my mother wasn’t married. And I was whisked off to Westchester before I was even two months old. When people asked me where I was from, I would never say “New York,” because that would have been cheating; I lived in the suburbs. I knew that I’d been born in the city, but the fact meant just about absolutely nothing, because it didn’t change the fact that I was miserable in Bronxville. Well, not actually miserable, maybe, but certainly training to be: I was determined to grow up to be interesting, and that pretty much meant that I was going to have to discover what “interesting” looked like, because there sure wasn’t any in Bronxville. (That was, and from what I can tell still is, the whole point of Bronxville.) It would take a long time for me to grasp that, in my case, anyway, “interesting” isn’t so much what you do or what you say as what you write, and, all resemblances to Santa Claus and Captain Smith aside, I am not a particularly interesting person to be around, unless you want me to show you round the Museum. I read, I write. I set the table for dinner with crystal and silver, and, after dinner, I wash the dishes. But I’m back where I came from, and man, is that great.

I asked the driver how long he’d lived in New York. “Ten years” was the answer. “Ten years is good,” I said. That’s about how long I’ve felt, at some moment almost every day, a deep contentment to find myself walking around on the rock where I was born.

Directly beneath the photo and squib about Tom Perrotta, on the back of the box containing the 8 CDs of the audiobook edition of The Leftovers, it says, clearly and distinctly: Read by Dennis Boutsikaris. But I managed to miss this notice in my sudden eagerness to hear the author read his latest novel. I didn’t buy The Leftovers when it came out, even though I’m something of a Perrotta fan — that “something” is precisely what I’m trying to put my finger on” —because it’s about the aftermath of a Rapture=like event called the Sudden Departure. Oh, dear no; I didn’t want to read about that. But it was easy to persuade myself, in the hunt for a satisfying audio experience, that I’d enjoy the book if Tom Perrotta read it to me. When I found out that that wasn’t going to happen — I was walking out the door on my way to Saturday night’s Orpheus concert when the discovery was made, and it was too late to fiddle with alternative entertainment — I was bitterly disappointed. Mr Boutsikaris is, apparently, a veteran reader of audiobooks who sounds a little bit like Dennis Farina, if not quite so Midwestern. I am not going to enjoy listening to him read The Leftovers. But I will make the best of it; the $39.95 (gasp) purchase price will not have been a total loss.

You wouldn’t think that Tom Perrotta’s novels would be my cup of tea. The author’s being an American male, for example. I don’t read novels by American males, almost, I could say, as a rule. Brian Morton is an exception that comes swiftly to mind, as of course does Jonathan Franzen. The run of prestigious American male novelists makes me feel like Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, and Rachel Maddow all rolled into one: when is this kid’s mother coming to pick him up? The American male novelist generally assumes that (each) the story of a man who finds himself while rejecting or transcending everyday society is an interesting and useful story to tell. It is not, particularly as what the man usually finds out about himself is that sex is a gyp. American male novelists have little or no conception of the leading role that social life has in the formation of character. That’s probably why I make an exception for Tom Perrotta. Tom Perrotta has a complete conception of this fact of human nature.

But then, there’s his suburban subject matter. “Suburban” seems unduly marginalizing, because what Perrotta writes about is where most halfway comfortable people live, but I’m still very glad that I don’t live there. Perrotta doesn’t make it “interesting”; on the contrary, he seems determined, in the course of his career as a novelist, to get as close as he can to the default settings of American life. This is not to say that he wants to write about absolutely average, mediocre people. No, he’s writing about America, after all, and that means capturing the American Dream. What’s it like to live the American Dream, at least in its vernacular versions. What’s it like to be trying to live the American Dream? Ask me if I care.

Tom Perrotta seems to know — he seems reluctant, personally, to know what his work has taught him — that the American Dream is indeed a dream, something for sleepy-time. It is not an idea of being awake. It is not a plan for making the world a better place. On the contrary, it is a profoundly anti-social goal, and that’s what makes Perrotta a powerful writer — his knowing this. I think of Tom Perrotta as a man of George Carlin’s fierce intelligence but also of a Franciscan monk’s piety, respect for the world as it is. He neither rants nor preaches, but he limns good, decent people who have been sold a bill of goods.

He always makes me wonder what I’ve got to offer that’s any better.