Good clocks don’t run down, ticking ever more slowly until their hands stop moving. They either tell the time or they stop. So I’m much more like a bad clock right now, a poorly designed contraption. I am definitely ticking ever more slowly. Every day is a little bit harder to get through than the one before. But only a little. It’s not so bad. It’s just perceptibly worse than normal. For which I’m very grateful — both for the normal, which wouldn’t be normal at all if it weren’t for the Remicade that is going to bring me right back to it next Tuesday, and for the marginal nature of the deterioration. I’m never actually sick. Just “tired.” And the thing that tires me out the most is making plans. The nice thing about today is that I don’t think that I’m going to have to make any plans. My plans are in place. Certainty is its own source of energy.

***

As we walked from the Biltmore to the Brasserie last night, we talked about great performances that we had seen on and off Broadway over the years. Well, we didn’t talk about them; we enumerated them. When I’d said, of the play that we’d just seen, David Ives’s Venus in Fur, that it was “one of those big nights that you put in your Broadway scrapbook,” I was thinking that, maybe, there were four or five other performances to compare with Nina Arianda’s, but by the time dinner was over, we were well past the thirty-mark — we’ve seen Stockard Channing alone on three extremely memorable occasions, in Hapgood, The Lion in Winter, and The Little Foxes; and mentioning Hapgood reminds us of her costar, David Strathairn, in Stranger, with Kyra Sedgwick; and on it goes — and we never did remember Jefferson Mays in I Am My Own Wife. The fact is, we’ve seen a lot of great theatre. We haven’t seen everything; from a true theatregoer’s perspective, we haven’t even seen very much. Our scrapbook doesn’t have to be all that voluminous. But there will definitely be a page for Nina Arianda’s Vanda. Let me say right away that Hugh Dancy, the other member of the cast (he plays a young man called Thomas), was superb as well: he carried Ms Arianda as beautifully as Nureyev carried Fonteyn. But Venus in Fur is about the goddess in the title.

Venus in Fur shimmers from shifting perspectives. There is of course the novel by Sacher-Masoch, that caused a perversion to be branded with the author’s name, and the title of which David Ives borrowed for his play. Somewhat more distant but vastly more resonant, there is Euripides’s terrifying Bacchae. In that play, a foolish king believes himself powerful enough to subdue what he takes to be a disorderl, ecstatic cult, and fails to recognize the presence of the god Dionysus. Dramatic irony is wound to the highest pitch as the god helps the king to disguise himself as one of the madwomen, headed by his own mother, who roam the outlying hills and whose excesses the king insists upon stopping. The disguise is foolish, because the god simply betrays the king to his antagonists; his mother is the first to attack him. What this has to do with Venus in Fur is the latter’s demonstration of the updated folly of a theatre director who believes that he can tame an ambitious actress.

You can see Vanda as an incarnation of Venus, as a goddess who has somehow descended upon a hapless and confused but also somewhat grandiose dramaturge. (The conceit of Thomas’s relation to the drama that he is trying to cast is intriguing, because, as the adapter of a novel who intends to direct a production of his adaptation, Thomas is nonetheless not the playwright.) You can imagine that the thunder and lightning that frame the show signal the presence of a dangerous divinity. Living in New York, however, it’s much easier to imagine Vanda as an intense striver determined to do anything to get a part, even if it means purloining a copy of the entire script, buying an assortment of surprisingly suitable props, and and stalking the director. Not to mention a willingness to deploy no fewer than three fatal instrumentalities. There is no real need to get all supernatural and stuff. But it’s fun to do so, because Venus in Fur is, at heart, a comedy about getting what you asked for.

Nina Arianda is very funny and very agile; she’s frankly acrobatic. But what sears her performance into the mind is her dangerousness. Even when she’s being A jolly ditz, as in the earlier part of Venus in Fur, she is clearly (dramatic irony!) not to be trusted. And when she slips from her late-stage Valley Girl like-lish into the husky, artistocratic tones of the baroness in Thomas’s adaptation, the effect is simultaneously hilarious and menacing. (Barbra Streisand and Nicole Kidman are the only other comediennes I can think of who are as agile at shifting registers faster than the blink of an eye.) But no matter how deeply her performance unsettles you, you walk out of the theatre on clouds, because you know that there are going to be at least three or four utterly memorable evenings ahead. Plays are going to be written for Nina Arianda.

Until the other day, I had never looked at a recipe for garlic bread. It had not occurred to me that garlic bread might be something that I ought to learn how to make. I thought that I already knew. I made it the way they made it at the bar nearest campus on Notre Dame Avenue. Not Louie’s, but somebody-else’s; when I went back to law school, it had been renamed, cynically, The Library. I think. Neither here nor there. That’s where I was first exposed to garlic bread. It was obvious that all you did, to make this garlic bread, was slice a loaf of Italian bread into rounds and then spread garlic butter on one side of each (with, maybe, a dusting of parmesan). A few minutes’ toasting in the oven, and voilà: garlic bread. I didn’t make it often, but I made it for years, despite the fact that it was never really satisfactory.

The other day, I was leafing through Gourmet’s Quick Kitchen, a compendium of recipes for two, for the umpteenth time, looking for inspiration. What I found instead were recipes that I’d tried once, years ago, and not particularly cared for. I ought to know this book, and its equally invaluable companion, In Short Order, by heart, but then cooking is something that I do on the side. Quick Kitchen is the fancier of the two by a hair. It begins with a suite of menus with aspirational titles such as “Lunch By the Fire” and “A Hearty Bachelor’s Dinner” (shouldn’t that be bachelors’?). My eye was drawn to the “Carefree Pasta Lunch.” Because what I wanted to make, the minute I saw it, was carefree. Carefree with a side of pasta sounds like heaven.

But of course pasta is the main event here — Pasta with Prosciutto, Peppers, and Herbs — and what’s on the side is garlic bread. With the idlest curiosity, I looked over the instructions for garlic bread. At some point — it was very quick — idle curiosity was replaced by sense memory. This is how they make garlic bread at Caffè Grazie! The garlic bread that we order the second we sit down, and can never get enough of.

(Caffè Grazie is a pleasant Italian restaurant in a brownstone on East 84th Street, just a few steps from the Museum. Kathleen and I like to eat there after concerts or previews. As long as we’re on the subject, their tiramisù is very much to my taste. They make a veal tortellini dish that is so earthy that I almost gagged the first time I had it, but I couldn’t help myself ordering it again and again. )

Forget slicing the loaf as if you were making sandwiches. Slice the loaf in half the other way, lengthwise, and then cut off six-inch sections. Combine butter, minced garlic, salt and paprika to taste. Spread the butter on the bread and toast it in the oven for about three minutes. Voilà: much better garlic bread.

***

This is the sort of thing that drives me (quietly) crazy: learning how to do things well at my age. What on earth took so long? A big part of the problem, of course, is that, like the scamps in Molière’s satire, Les Précieuses ridicules, I was born knowing everything that there is to know, and it has taken decades to cure this affliction. But there’s also a social factor. In our world, you’re expected to learn how to do things that will earn income. (There’s really not much to this, if you’re inclined to pay attention and do as you’re told.) If you’re ambitious, you may develop a sought-after expertise in some field or other. But no one expects you to be an expert at living your own life. Beyond table manners and basic hygiene, you’re not taught anything about how to live your life. I’m not talking about higher purposes here, obviously. I’m talking about getting through the day with dispatch and satisfaction.

Daily life has a million moving parts, so getting it right isn’t going to be easy. How do you balance your interest in reading, with a nice glass or two of wine, with the need to be rested? Where do you get the discipline — the courage, even — to do things that feel all wrong, like exercise and diets? Like struggling with Bayes’s Theorem on page 32 of Statistics in a Nutshell? “Don’t sweat the small stuff” is the sort of rule that you can put into practice only if you have a chauffeur. The small stuff — there is no end of it — requires some amount of sweat, or at least concern. How much is too much?

The answer is different for everyone. All the answers are, and all the questions. That’s why self-help books don’t work. A truly useful self-help book would have one, and only one, reader.

For the moment, I’m happy with garlic bread.

At about four o’clock yesterday afternoon — evening, really; it gets dark so early these days — Will was in his stroller and I was about to push him across Avenue C. Kathleen and I were taking him to Tompkins Square Park to play for an hour. On the opposite corner, outside the beer garden, a fair-complexioned woman in her fifties was smiling at me. She had the open, un-made-up face of a former nun, with slightly flyaway hair. She was walking with a cane that she did not seem particularly to need. I could tell this because she did not wait for the traffic light to change in favor of our crossing Avenue C. She was already across the street by the time the light changed. She had beamed at me — well, beaming is perhaps a bit intense — the whole way, and I had smiled back, something I’d never have done if I’d been alone. Will has made a proudly gregarious grandpapa out of me, and I am not shy about acknowledging the appreciation of strangers. But the woman was smiling at me, and I probably oughtn’t to have been so surprised when she said, as she passed us, “You have a beautiful beard.” Emphasis supplied.

***

On Friday morning, I went to see Hugo. I encourage everyone who likes going to the movies to see it, because, as a beautiful tribute to the inventiveness of Georges Méliès, it honors the roots from which the “filmed entertainment” of today has grown. It’s a reminder that movies can be as great as they are hokey.

Hugo is based on a Young Adult novel by Brian Selznik, The Invention of Hugo Cabret. I’m finding that there are two kinds of Young Adult fiction. Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You, by Peter Cameron, is the best book that I can think of that really deserves the classification, but Jane Eyre is probably the most famous. The other type of Young Adult fiction ought better to be described as Ageing Child. Unlike true Young Adult novels, books for Ageing Children — and Hugo Cabret would seem to be one; David Mitchell’s last novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet turned out to be another, even though it was ostensibly aimed at Adult Adults — are closed off from complexity. Complications abound, but they’re all sorted out in the end, and often long before. There’s nothing wrong with that, really, but it can be heavy when it isn’t amusing. And Hugo’s tale is not very amusing.There is not a lot of fun in the story of Hugo, an orphan who winds all the clocks at the Gare du Nord in the middle of the 1920s. Fun for us, I mean; Hugo’s story is implausible where it ought to be interesting. But I’ll be making it sound like Dickens if I keep this up.

The joy of Hugo is that Martin Scorsese has embedded the boy’s own story in a Wunderkammer of cinematic treats. Who’s that man in round-lensed spectacles whom Hugo nearly knocks over as he flees the monomaniac station inspector, who loves nothing so much as sending urchins off to the orphanage? Why, it’s James Joyce! Why are those immense statues in the cemetery so familiar? Because they’re blown-up versions of the mourners from the tomb of Jean sans Peur in Dijon — they were exhibited here, at the Museum, last year. Most of all, stealing the show as it nears the finale, is the story of Méliès, and the recreation, in 3D, of famous bits and pieces from his vast output. As an homage to the movies, it outclasses anything every produced for the Academy Awards. The story of Hugo aside, Hugo tremendously moving without being disagreeably sentimental.

 Two things keep Hugo from being truly magical, at least for this grown-up. First, the cast. The cast is superb (insert formulaic encomia here), but its members are British, or at any rate not French. This bit of catering to American provinciality, exploiting English accents to signify “abroad,” is nothing less than embarrassing, and embarrassing more or less every time an actor opens his mouth. The other thing is the movie’s indulgence of a perverse desire to look down on the Eiffel Tower from a great height. You can look down on the Eiffel Tower from a great height if you are in some kind of airplane, or dirigible, or other flying contraption. You cannot look down upon it from nearby mountaintops, because there aren’t any in Paris, and you most certainly cannot look down on the Eiffel Tower from the campanile at the Gare du Nord, because there isn’t one of those, either, and even if there were it would only be tall enough to look up. There’s a perfectly dreadful moment when the little girl in the story asks Hugo where he lives. They’re strolling along the Seine, near Notre Dame, at this point, but that doesn’t stop Hugo from pointing, “Over there,” to a cgi shot in which the terminal is given a more convenient, riverside location. Hollywood.

***

On Saturday night, we went to a birthday party. We thought that we were going to an Orpheus concert at Carnegie Hall, but life is not simple. The concert turned out to be a tie-in, broadcast live, with the 75th anniversary of the founding of WQXR, the radio station that was owned by the New York Times for decades and that now forms a part of New York Public Radio. Seventy-five years! When I say that that doesn’t seem a very long time, what I mean is that this portal to classical music that I discovered on my own when I was nine or ten and passing the time on a sick day, is only twelve years older than I am. Which isn’t old at all, right?

What with announcements from various representatives of the organizations involved, the music didn’t begin until 7:25. The evening’s soloist, oboist Albrecht Mayer, tacked two encores onto his performance. These were followed by the world’s longest interval. You could have enjoyed a turkey dinner during the intermission, and perhaps taken in a night-club act as well. Kathleen was in agony. A nerve in her shoulder got pinched somehow, and her left arm ached no matter how she positioned it. Ordinarily, I would have offered to take her home, but I really really wanted to hear Haydn’s Drum Roll Symphony, and Kathleen indulged me. She said that she’d feel better at dinner, after she took some Advil, which, in the event, she did. But before the Haydn we had a new composition by Andrew Norman, a young composer who now lives in Brooklyn. Even in her pain, Kathleen thought that it was interesting. But she had no taste for Haydn afterward. Abandoning herself to daydreams of walking on the beach (“It worked”), she got through the final half hour without giving the music a thought.

It was exactly the sort of performance that is the whole reason for going to Orpheus concerts. It made the familiar symphony entirely fresh, which is to say, I suppose, that it completely rewrote my impression of the work. I mean to use the idea of rewriting in its recent digital or cognitive sense. The rewriting didn’t involve very much that was absolutely new, but even as it clarified my response — I saw the first movement as a study in framing, and grasped (partly, no doubt, because Kathleen wasn’t feeling well) that, aside from the minuet, its movements are reluctant to conclude. In the minuet, at about Bar 19, there’s an orchestral thickening that brings Schubert’s arduous workouts to mind, and that quite shatters any notion of a courtly dance. My overall feeling about the symphony — that it ought to go by the nickname “Creation,” not “Drum Roll” — was reinforced at almost every moment of the performance. Never more so than in the finale, however: this movement more and more strikes me as a fraternal twin of the “Hallelujah” chorus that ends Part II of Das Schöpfung, “Vollendet ist das große Werk.” Like the oratorio, the symphony is as grand as it is possible to be without an iota of pomposity.

The concert began — when it began — with Hindemith’s Kammermusik Nº 1, written in 1922 for the Donaueschingen Festival. I am not crazy about Hindemith, and I thought that I was being funny when I told Kathleen that, although the program allotted sixteen minutes to the work’s performance, its duration was actually eternal. This turned out to be fatuous. After a rambunctious but very brief overture and an agreeable opening movement, there’s an enchanting quartet for winds and percussion that sets the mood of classic Chinese landscapes, hushed, delicate, and sweetly forlorn. As for the finale, with its ostinato growls it might well be thought of as Le Sacre de Weimar. It’s otiose to ask if Hindemith had Stravinsky in mind (of course he did!), but the surprise is the completeness with which Hindemith makes his borrowings all his own. It goes without saying that a German response to Stravinsky’s mad ecstasy would, after the Great War, take the form of chamber music.

***

On the front page of today’s Times, there’s a story about the soon-to-be-discontinued visits that the submersible vessel Mir has been paying to the wreck of the Titanic. Further proof that the centenary of the world’s most famous shipwreck is upon us came to me during the coming attractions trailers that preceded Hugo on Friday. Among the many marvels that I have lived to see is the ability to refit an old movie in 3D, and Titanic, one of the worst movies ever made, is getting the treatment, for release next year. I mention this only because the trailer afforded a glimpse of Bernard Hill, as Captain Edward James Smith. It was the first glimpse that I’d had, since Willy, the barber who keeps my beard looking beautiful, took to calling me Capitán because I remind him of Captain Smith. It’s not a comparison that, given the outcome, I’m particularly keen about, but it’s certainly more dignified than Santa Claus, so I go with it. On balance, I think that I have a much more beautiful beard — er, well-shaped — than the the one with which Bernard Hill was supplied.

Not my beautiful grandson. (And he is beautiful.) My beautiful beard. But what was I thinking? I was in the East Village!

Last night, I had a ticket to a chamber concert at Weill Recital Hall, but I stayed home. I wasn’t feeling, as they say, “100%,” and I’d been out almost all day on Wednesday, the day before. One of the things that was making me feel less than “100%” was the dining table, which was covered with stacks of mail. The past couple of days have seen record intakes of catalogues, often duplicates, almost all of which would be thrown away. (Kathleen and I recently made the decision not to hold on to bedding catalogues. We buy bed linens on the punctured-equilibrium plan, four or five new sets at time, and during the two or three years that follow these sprees, we have no interest in shopping for more. Pitch ’em.) I was supposed to deal with paperwork on Tuesday, but I didn’t feel well on Tuesday (I felt substantially below “100%” — sick, almost). Once upon a time, I could put off the stuff that “I was supposed to deal with on Tuesday” for quite a while, more than a week, even. But those days are over. Two days is all it takes to turn neglected paperwork into rotting fish.

Besides, I had some new ideas about organizing the paperwork, and I craved a stretch of quiet hours in which to test out the mechanics.

I promise you that I am not going to share any of my new ideas about organizing paperwork.

***

Perhaps you can tell, from some tics of style in the foregoing, that I’ve been reading Nora Efron. More accurately, I’ve been listening to Nora Efron, reading her book, I Feel Bad About My Neck. This book came out several years ago, by which time I’d read much of its content in The New Yorker. I bought the audio version because in those days, just after I’d broken my neck, I was religiously taking hourlong walks every day, and to divert myself from the views of pavement to which ankylosing spondylitis has condemned me, I listened to books instead of reading them. It was hard to find good titles, but that’s another story. It’s another story because, in the case of I Feel Bad About My Neck, I never opened the box. I never opened the box until Monday, when I re-introduced the regime of daily walks. I wouldn’t walk for an hour, but at least I’d get to the river.

I liked I Feel Bad About My Neck so much that I couldn’t stop listening to it when I got home. All through the preparation of dinner, I was entertained by Efron’s wry, faux self-deprecations. (People who write and direct popular comedies and still talk of “my friend, Bob Gottlieb” cannot seriously put themselves down). It was like being at a party, listening to someone very funny and wise. That happens! It doesn’t happen often, but it happens. I felt so convivial, listening to Efron talk about her romance with the Apthorpe (an apartment building on Broadway), that I drank a few too many glasses of Chablis on the rocks while I was getting dinner ready. That’s why I felt so far from “100%” on Tuesday.

I haven’t taken any more walks this week. Tuesday, I felt lousy. Wednesday, I ran errands in the neighborhood and was on my feet a great deal longer than I’d have been for taking a walk, so it’s not a total loss. Not to mention babysitting! Yesterday, I was saving my strength for an evening outing that did not take place. Today, I’ll go to the movies early (Hugo, I think), have a quick bite at Shake Shack maybe, and pick up fixings for dinner at Fairway. Even if I could take a walk, there wouldn’t be any more Nora Efron to listen to. I pretty much finished it off last night, staying home, making spaghetti alla carbonara. (I could treat myself to my second-favorite dish because Kathleen, who doesn’t care for it, had a bar association thing.) /This time, I did not have a drop of wine until I sat down to eat.

Nora Efron is an engaging, attractive reader of her own material, and I’m glad that she has made the recordings so that now for all time we will know how it ought to be read. The thing is, though, that feeling that I was at a party with Nora Efron kept reminding me of a real party that she was at. I wasn’t there, but James Wolcott was, and he writes about it in Lucking Out. He writes about having a short conversation with Efron at a party at (her friend) Mort Zuckerman’s.

At the end of our brief chat, at a loss for a swave way to take my leave, I inanely said to Nora, “Well, maybe we’ll run into each other sometime soon.” “I doubt it,” she said, not curtly, but as a clipped fact of life, spearing my empty pleasantry with a fish fork.

I suppose that the right way to regard this anecdote is to understand that, even when she is being mean, Nora Efron gives her victims good, funny copy.

***

After dinner, I poured what remained in the carafe back into the wine box in the refrigerator, filled a final mug of tea, and got to work on the papers. Having foreseen that this would be tedious work, I’d ordered a copy of When Harry Met Sally…, the 1989 classic written by Nora Efron, from the Video Room, and it had been promptly delivered, in plenty of time for my after-dinner sortings. I’d seen the movie only once before, not in the theatre, and found it so-so. It’s a screwball comedy, yes; the characters who turn out to be in love with one another must discover themselves first. But it’s fairly bleak screwball, because the humor lies almost entirely in the battle-of-the-sexes banter that Harry and Sally exchange. There is nothing in the movie to compare with, say, Cary Grant’s telling Irene Dunne that when she gets tired of Oklahoma City she can always go over to Tulsa. No, Meg Ryan’s fake orgasm is not comparable to Cary Grant saying that, or to Irene Dunne’s quip about the night-club dancer who calls herself Dixie Belle Lee. “I suppose it was easier for her to change her name than for her entire family to change their name.” When Harry Met Sally… is funny, but its lack of effervescence pulls it a long way down from the 100% of The Awful Truth.

I am not going to share any of my new ideas about organizing paperwork now. I am only going to mention one astounding insight: paperwork is never in place until you’re dead, so don’t go for it.  

It was good for ten minutes at least. Will struggled — but calmly, determinedly — with the problem of fitting three little train cars into two little Western boots. The boots were still a bit too big for him (had I even seen them before last night?), but the train cars weren’t so very small, and the short answer to Will’s problem was that it couldn’t be done. Neither he nor anyone else could ever fit those three train cars into those two boots. But Will, with a manner that made me feel that I was having an out-of-body experience, had to discover this for himself. What was not so familiar was his patience; he didn’t get frustrated or cross. Eventually, like the WOPR in War Games, he concluded that the best way to win the game was not to play. He may have to give the game a few more rounds before he establishes this conclusion firmly in his mind, but I won’t object, as long as I get to hold the boots, as I did last night.

***

It’s the beginning of the month, and, not only that, but it’s about to beginning of a new year, so: resolutions and changes. For a long time, I’ve been meditating a thumbnail version of this blog, so that readers could tell at a glance what the daily entry was about. (I believe that there are Daily Blague readers who aren’t interested in Georgian ministries.) Happily, there’s no need to start up a new blog; all I’ve got to do is revive an old one — and, what d’you know, it’s called The Daily Blague. Youu may remember it. During the coming month, I’m going to try to make it look more like this site — exactly like this site, actually, only with different daily entries and a slightly larger font. The idea, in case you haven’t guessed it, is to develop a site that looks great on the Kindle Fire.

Another resolution: to make one Twitter-like pronouncement every day at Civil Pleasures. (There will be no 140-character maximum.)

For some reason or other, I decided to leave Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow at home when we went to St Croix. Looking back, I think that I’d have enjoyed reading it down there. It’s a superbly entertaining book — it’s almost a book of games for clever people. If it were  a book of games, I’d have no time for it; my intellectual preference (so to speak) has no time for games at all. (Games are for children.) Kahneman, wisely, frames his puzzles as test results.

The chapter template goes something like this:

— Consider this sentence, A.
— You probably reacted in thus and such a manner, drawing conclusion Q. But (of course) Q is mistaken/improbable.
— Here’s why you erred: we tested students/professionals in Oregon/Germany/Israel and found that X.
— Your System 1 does this. Your System 2 does or, more likely, fails to do, that. We call it the N heuristic/affect.

As I say, it’s very entertaining. But of course it’s challenging as well. Once you’re familiar with the template, you approach sentence A more and more critically. And something happens that Kahneman doesn’t account for — not that I’m faulting him! Your System 1, Kahneman’s shorthand abstraction for the bundle of processes that yield automatic cognition, is malleable when it comes to reading. Another way to put this is to say that System 1 is a fast learner when it comes to reading. Most of its habits may have been set in genetic stone on the African savannah, but its reading habits (there was no reading on the savannah) are amenable to upgrades.

On page 113 of Thining, Fast and Slow, Kahneman proposes a sentence: “In a telephone poll of 300 seniors seniors, 60% support the president.” Kahneman then asks,

If you had to summarize the message of this sentence in exactly three words, what would they be? Almost certainly you would choose “elderly support present.”

Well, excuse me, but, no; my three words would be “small sample question?” I read crappy statements like this in quantity almost every day. I have developed allergies to them. The very word “poll” throws up a red flag, signaling that what follows is likely to be tripe. (I’d like to explore the polling problem, which, as I saw last night when all of this occurred to me, is one of protocol failure: there are no rules for framing polling questions; on the contrary, there are only rules of thumb that exploit the affects and heurisitics that Kahneman is writing about, deployed in order to allow pollsters to tell their clients what they want to hear.) Something happens to my System 1 when it encounters the word “poll.” Something vaguely equivalent to the fight-or-flight response kicks in. My immediate response was that the sample was too small to be meaningful (as Kahneman points out, it would skew toward extremes), and that the actual question posed to the seniors was not presented. The question mark at the end of my three words is a way of responding not with the summary of the statement’s “story” that Kahneman asked for but with a critique of the statement as a statement.

Kahneman doubts that System 1 is capable of critical discernment; that’s System 2’s job. I’m not going to quibble; Kahneman doesn’t mean for his abstract systems to be taken too literally. All he wants to do is caution us against cognitive biases. But his book has begun to remind me that there is something very strange about reading, the visual skill that requires an almost total suppression of visual stimulus. 

So strange, that when I read the first sentence of Derek Parfit’s On What Matters — yes, I ordered it and it arrived, massively — “We are the animals that can both understand and respond to reasons,” I thought, well, yes, but what’s really important is that we are the animals that can learn to read and write. (Parfit’s understanding and response to reasons, requiring the tomes that it does, certainly depend on his ability to read and to write.) But that’s another matter. For the moment, let me just say that reading Kahneman and Parfit side by side is like taking a single journey via two modes of transportation simultaneously. Probably, in fact, not a good idea.

Beware Rumination. This is one of the lessons that David Brooks is abstracting from the “Life Reports” that he recently solicited from readers over the age of 70. Forget what Socrates said about the unexamined life in Plato’s Apology.

Beware rumination. There were many long, detailed essays by people who are experts at self-examination. They could finely calibrate each passing emotion. But these people often did not lead the happiest or most fulfilling lives. It’s not only that they were driven to introspection by bad events. Through self-obsession, they seemed to reinforce the very emotions, thoughts and habits they were trying to escape.

Many of the most impressive people, on the other hand, were strategic self-deceivers. When something bad was done to them, they forgot it, forgave it or were grateful for it. When it comes to self-narratives, honesty may not be the best policy.

I’m inclined, against my better judgment, to agree. But I resist. Psychopaths, remember, are unsurpassed at strategic self-deception. And I’m not sure that it’s dishonest to forgive and forget.

***

Perhaps I’m missing Brooks’s point, and perhaps I’m missing it because he wrote rumination instead of nursing grudges. I don’t know where anybody finds the time or the taste for stewing over slights. I find it unpleasant to think ill of people, and so I distance myself from those who give rise to such thoughts. I keep away from them if they’re still around, and I forget about them if they’re gone. I suppose I have an unusual degree of freedom in this regard, but I take full advantage of it.

It occurred to me, on vacation, that I have two modes of self-evaluation. We’ll call them the sunny and the cloudy. The sunny mode is prompted by good feelings, and it moves me to give thanks for all the positive things that have happened to me, as well as all the advantages that I’ve enjoyed. I think I’m very lucky, in sunny mode. In cloudy mode, I feel responsible. The cloudy mode takes over when I’m not feeling good about myself or about the way things are going (the same thing, as it usually happens). It is obvious to me that I could do better, and I’m ashamed of having done worse. The result is that I take credit only for my faults, and this means that I can’t offset them with my virtues, because the virtues aren’t mine in the same way that the faults are. I’m talking about a habit of mind, not a logical process. It’s clearly illogical. But I think that it’s a healthy way of living.

***

 

When I saw that the editors of the Book Review had assigned John Lewis Gaddis’s new biography to Henry Kissinger for review, my brow furrowed. I don’t know much of anything about the personal politics of American diplomacy, but I have never thought that Kennan would approve (or even begin to approve) of Dr Kissinger’s brand of realpolitik. Indeed, when I read one of Kennan’s last statements, published in an interview in the New York Review of Books, in 1999 —

This whole tendency to see ourselves [Americans] as the center of political enlightenment and as teachers to a great part of the rest of the world strikes me as unthought-through, vainglorious, and undesirable.

— I thought, not of Henry Kissinger certainly, but of his political masters and the pitch that they made to the American public. Dr Kissinger worked tirelessly (in the time remaining after self-promotion, it always seemed to me) to calculate ways of making America’s narcisissm practicable, and probably did a better job of it than anyone else might have done. But Kennan would have dismissed the entire undertaking as, ultimately, undesirable.

The Kissinger review was predictably suave, friendly and forgiving. What was there to forgive? “Kennan blighted his career in government through a tendency to recoil from the implications of his views.” So says Henry Kissinger. Of the book itself:

We can be grateful to John Lewis Gaddis for bringing Kennan back to us, throughtful, human, self-centered, contradictory, inspirational — a permanent spur as consciences are wont to be. Masterfully researched, exhaustively documented, Gaddis’s moving work gives us a figure with whom, however one might differ on details, it was a privilege to be a contemporary.

The fix was in. The first review of Gaddis’s book that I encountered was Louis Menand’s, in The New Yorker.

The one puzzle in John Lewis Gaddis’s first-rate biography of the diplomat George Kennan, which Gaddis began in 1982, when his subject was seventy-eight, and waited nearly thirty years to complete, since Kennan lived to be a hundred and one, is the subtitle. The book is called George F. Kennan: An American Life (Penguin; $39.95), and the most peculiar thing about Kennan, a man not short on peculiarities, is that he had little love for, or even curiosity about, the country whose fortunes he devoted his life to safeguarding.

That’s a way of looking at what Kennan himself said, quoted above, but looked at from the outside. Kennan was not interested in the cultural life of the United States; to some extent, he doubted that it had one. He was always more captivated by what used to be called the “Russian soul,” and he was a passionate advocate of the proposition that the Russians would eventually have done with Communist foolishness and Stalinist barbarity. This was, indeed, the wellspring of his notion of containment. Left to themselves — unprovoked by foreign aggression, military or otherwise — and kept to themselves — encircled by firm Western alliances, the inhabitants of the Soviet Union would sooner or later, but inevitably, replace it with something more humane and workable. As in fact they did.

In a very provocative and somewhat chilling piece in the current issue of the NYRB, Frank Costigliola, the editor of Kennan’s massive diaries, challenges the “authorized” claim of Gaddis’s work. There is no doubt that Kennan authorized the project. But his diraries, over the two decades and more that followed the green light, evidence a growing pessimism about the outcome.

By 2000, Kennan, now ninety-six years old, despaired in his diary that Gaddis “had no idea of what was really at stake” in the “long battle I was waging … against the almost total militarization of Western policy toward Russia.” Looking back at the nuclear holocaust narrowely averted during the Cuban missile crisis and the Berlin crisis of 1958 to 1961, and at the costly proxy wars waged in Vietnam and elsewhere, he believed that “had my efforts been successful,” they “could have obviated vast expense, dangers, and distortions of outlook of the ensuing Cold War.”

Gaddis, Costigliola charges,

sides largely with Kennan’s critics, such as former secretary of state Dean Acheson, in the heated debate over Kennan’s advocacy in 1957-1958 for US “disengagement” from the cold war in Europe.

What kind of a life — what kind of an authorized autobiography — is that? Well, it is the kind of life that will “save” Kennan for the American cause. Gaddis (and Henry Kissinger) praise the parts of Kennan’s thought that suit their understanding of the Cold War — in retrospect, a fatuous exercise of military expense and enjoyment (to borrow from Jane Austen; in Mansfield Park, she describes the heir, Tom Bertram, as “born for expense and enjoyment,” keenly nailing enjoyment to expense) — and they rap him on the knuckles for the rest, asking us to believe that Kennan was “inconsistent.” But the importance of George Kennan, for the people of the world, is precisely that he was a greater statesman than American; he knew which was more important. Costigliola writes,

Though he captures much of the man’s complexity, Gaddis’s depiction of Kennan is ultimately clipped and flattened. Perhaps the problem is trying to frame with “an American life,” as the subtitle has it, the  biography of someone who mused that even his friends did “not know the depth of my estrangement, the depth of my repugnance of the things [the American public] lives by.” As compared to the portrait in the biography, the personality revealed in Kennan’s diaries and letters — even the figure who emerges in the transcripts of Gaddis’s interviews — was more irreverent as a collegian, more deeply identified with Russian culture as a fledgling diplomat, more ambivalent about his marriage, more alienated from American life, more inclined to conceealment, and more tortured by the limitations of old age. The Kennan of the letters and the diaries is far less conventional and more complex and elusive than the person we encounter in Gaddis’s biography.

George F Kennan: An American Straitjacket. Let’s hope that John Lewis Gaddis’s attempt to bury his subjecct in it will not succeed.

Well, you may ask, how did he manage to get through a thousand years of travel before all of this bitching and moaning about how he needs to stay at home to curry his craft? How did anybody put up with him?

Answer: Kathleen did put up with me, so anybody else’s willingness never came up. 

Answer: It was a James Bond-type vanity of abomidable-conceit proportions. When I traveled, I saw myself in some sort of 1960s ad for Scotch, in which I had only three lines: “Put it there,” “Thank you,” and “A Tanquery martini, up with an olive and not too dry.” Everything else was off the menu. I happened to be very good at this. Given these three handy phrases, I could go anywhere on earth and be worshiped by the locals, and I was. Generous tipping didn’t hurt. Even in places where martinis aren’t made from Scotch.

In any case, that’s what travel means to me. It means standing in a foreign hotel room that’s contrived to look like a room in your own home, smiling at somebody who has just carried something heavy across the threshold, and either signing a chit or handing over bills. Insofar as that is what travel is about, I’m very good at it. It doesn’t matter that I care for it even less than the people who are toting barges and lifting bales.

My dream of dreams is to spend a week in New York City. Not the New York City where I live, but the other NYC, where we’d stay in a hotel, dine out every night and see a show (a different show every night) — and that would be that. Then we’d retire to Yorkville, venturing forth only to the odd concert at the Museum. That’s my dream. As the old lady says to Stifler, “Focus!”

What with packing and preparing for our Thanksgiving break, I’m finding it difficult to hear words well enough to write them down….

The very thought of leaving this apartment for a week is horribly disturbing. I used to hate travel, and I still do. But I hate leaving home even more. It’s not quite the same thing. I hate, for example, leaving home in the evening; I don’t like to go out at night anymore. What I want to do when it gets dark: go to bed. And now, thanks to Lunesta, that’s something that I can do. And then be up at the crack of dawn. It sounds crazy, except of course that in terms of natural human life, it could not possibly be more normal.

I want to write about James Wolcott’s memoir, Lucking Out, but first I’ve got to get a haircut, so that I don’t look too shaggy in St Croix. … And now I find that I neglected to update this entry on my way out the door. The barber thanked me for sending him a copy of the postcard that I had made of Will outside his shop (Willy’s, come to think of it) after his last haircut. I can’t say that the card was proudly displayed, but it was tucked into a shelf so that the half with Will in it showed.

James Wolcott — I mentioned a while back (last week, actually) that I picked up Lucking Out because I thought it might help me puzzle out why it is that I never pursued a career in journalism. Aside from the obvious, that is (I am much more curious about what people think than about what they do, I prefer to work in a quiet, well-appointed space, and don’t have much use for “news” as such). It didn’t take long for me to figure out that I could not have borne the locker-room atmosphere of mid-century journalism, with its insistent masculinity (a spinelessly overcompensating concession, ultimately, to the arrant philistinism of American life), and its dependence on metaphors of war and violence. All of this was embodied in “literary figures” whom I had and still have no time for: Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson. If I had tried to stick it out, I’d have died of drink and drugs before I was thirty. Of drink and drugs and dire demoralization.

But I kept reading Lucking Out, and, in the end, I enjoyed it — as a book. Wolcott is funny, modest in his way, and literate certainly; it was also a pleasure to read that the punk scene at CBGB’s, for example, was as insupportable as I’d thought it must have been. (Why anyone wants to spend a single non-excretory second in an atmosphere redolent of urine is beyond me, but Wolcott jumps right in and makes piss sound like the house champagne.) And then, there’s his friendship with Pauline Kael. Kael could be fun to read, I remember, but I never agreed with her about pictures that I’d seen, or wanted to see anything on her say-so. And I’m appalled to learn that she never saw films a second time. (The one exception, according to Wolcott, was the druggily dull McCabe and Mrs Miller.) I never know whether a picture’s any good until I’ve seen it a second time, a few months after the first. And I think that the Seventies, by and large, were gassy and unattractive, as most times of transition seem, on the historical record, to be.

I didn’t know what to make of the conceit of the fourth part’s juxtaposition of Wolcott’s interests in porn and ballet, but it was the “we were there” enthusiasm of his writing about the latter that registered another difference between us. And I’m speaking of a difference between us now, not as we were as young men (I believe that I’m vaguely older than Wolcott). I can’t find a truly apposite quote, I’m afraid, and it’s possible that there isn’t one, but I drew from Lucking Out the impression of a man who went out every night in search of memorable events. A man who now, writing about his youth, is thrilled to have encountered so many. He was there was Suzanne Farrell returned to City Ballet; he was there when Darci Kistler returned. He remembers the excitement in the audience. I wasn’t there, but I can’t imagine writing about it if I had been, unless it were to agree with or contradict a point.

Thinking about this made me realize why I remember so little of my own past. Our strongest memories (also our least reliable) are the ones that are reinforced by recollection itself. The reason why I’m up on a lot of dates in English history, say, is that I read a lot of English history; information that I already “possess” gets refreshed fairly regularly. But my recollections of evenings at the Houston Grand Opera are pretty threadbare. I don’t think that I could fill two pages with descriptions of what I remember, and almost everything that I said would be vague. I remember something about the harsh lighting in one of the scenes in Samuel Ramey’s Don Giovanni, for example. I remember Rudolph Nureyev prancing around in the most beautiful green costume in his pocket adaptation of Raymonda (and what fun the music was! I was mad about it for months afterward). The End.

The point is that what happend thirty, twenty, ten or even five years ago isn’t very interesting to me. It’s what’s happening right now that has my full attention — not that there’s anything the least bit exciting about writing in a room while La Valse oom-pahs in a corner. I only wish things were less exciting! But I’ve got to pack, so you’ll excuse me….

A few hours’ of imprudent hankie-sharing with runny-nosed Will, on Friday, obliged me to swallow a dose of NyQuil last night, enabling me to regret my lack of backbone this morning. Worse, aside from a few hours spent on housework, on Saturday, I did absolutely nothing this weekend but read Alan Hollinghurst’s very beautiful book, The Stranger’s Child; so, not only am I spineless but I find myself swaddled in a dream of that green and sceptered isle.  

***

I’ve read two frowning reviews of The Stranger’s Child, by James Wood and Daniel Mendelsohn. Both reviewers, it seems to me, want Alan Hollinghurst to do something that he’s clearly, on the evidence of the novel that he has actually written, not interested in doing. To be sure, they come to the book from opposite perspectives. To Wood, who is English but who works in the United States, the novel flirts with sentimental preciosity; it is too prettily English. To Mendelsohn, an American, the novel lacks a sympathetic core; what he doesn’t get is precisely what Wood’s afraid of: that The Stranger’s Child is about England. But the two critics unite is in a demand that the novel take a moral position on something, anything. Wood, complaining about what, to him, are stylistic curlicues:

These flecks of aspic are scarcely heinous, but cumulatively they suggest an overindulgent hospitality toward the material. Hollinghurst seems too ready to perpetuate a fond English elegy that he should, instead, be scrutinizing.

Among Mendelssohn’s numerous expressions of discontent, here’s the baldest:

You have to wonder what is being critiqued in the new book.

Do you? I thought that scrutiny and critique were critics’ tools, not novelists’. The critical habit of finding social criticism in novels is as easy to explain as the connection between the generosity of the Marshall Plan and trumped-up fears of communism in postwar America: it justifies the reading of fiction/the spending of millions. That’s to say that it appeases an anxiety about the “uselessness” of fiction — and of art generally.

But what Hollinghurst wants to do, it seems to me, is to tell a story, a particular kind of story, possibly a new kind of story — the only other example of such a story that I can think of is Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad. It is the kind of story in which a very great deal of material is omitted. One of the characters in The Stranger’s Child, Jennifer Ralph, has an interesting parentage; her father was the child of Daphne Sawle Valance Ralph (the central character if not — and she definitely is not — the novel’s protagonist). But who was his father? That’s a question that the book chews over for moments at a time. But the man himself, this child of dubious provenance, this father of a woman whom we meet as a girl and then as an Oxford don — this man never has a name. All we know about him is that he was “in rubber” in colonial Malaysia. I don’t regard Jenny’s father’s namelessness as a negligence. I think that Hollinghurst wants us to note it, and to take it as a reminder that every story involves the back ends of countless other stories. His story has lots of such holes.

The point of a novel such as The Stranger’s Child is to work a novel out of a story full of holes; to put it more “artistically,” we might speak of a narrative that weaves content with lacuna. I don’t want to carry this idea too far; the point is never that what’s left out is as or more important than what’s put in. In Egan’s book as well as Hollinghurst’s, though, the reader is unavoidably aware of making the calculations that impose coherence on the narrative. Egan’s calculations are a little more demanding than Hollinghurst’s, possibly because her book is frankly prospective, whereas The Stranger’s Child is “all about” the past. But the work is always pleasant and intriguing, never onerous. There is nothing new, of course, about readers’ completing stories in their minds; our minds flesh out the verbal content of every sentence that we hear. This new kind of novel that Egan and Hollinghurst have explored simply makes us aware of something that we do all the time. The very old-fashioned term for it is “leaving something to the imagination.” It’s what popular bad writers make their fortunes by avoiding.

***

It seems impossible — I must be mistaken — but I clearly remember a day, in the summer of 1977, when my father and I were driven from London to Stratford-on-Avon. This was a sentimental journey for my father; he had visited what he called “Shakespeare Country” several times with my mother, who had just died, and even though I never heard either of my parents so much as speak the name of any of Shakespeare’s works, they liked the countryside. (A similar fondness for “Sound of Music Country” remained stoutly disconnected from any interest in Mozart.) I know that you can make a day trip out of Stratford, but can you also see Blenheim, walk around Oxford, and have a leisurely lunch at a country hotel not too far from Birmingham? Yes, if you were traveling with my father, you could.

That drive is my total experience of the English countryside. It differs at no point from anything that I’ve seen in the movies. (Toss-up question: have more films been shot in Manhattan or the Home Counties?) And when I read about the English countryside, even though I can’t tell a spinney from a combe, I feel that I’m on very familiar ground. (The ground that I actually grew up on, which is the same here in Manhattan, especially at the north end of the island, as it is in Westchester County, is rather more exotic, a great deal rockier, beneath all the roads and buildings, and wilder.) This is not just because I know what England looks like, however; it’s because I’ve spent so much of my life in the heads of characters who’ve spent so much of their lives walking around in it. From Forster and Woolf to Ishiguro and McEwan, I’ve walked hundreds of English miles.

The Stranger’s Child is certainly a novel of the countryside. London is a grimmish offtstage anti-presence until very near the end of the book, by which time the city has swallowed up the village in which the story begins. London may be about pomp, but it’s the country that speaks of English power.

The High Ground was an immense lawn beyond the formal gardens, from which, though the climb to it seemed slight, you got “a remarkable view of nothing,” as Dudley put it: the house itself, of course, and the slowly dropping expense of farmland towards the villages of Bampton and Brize Norton. It was an easy uncalculating view, with no undue excitement, small woods of beech and poplar greening up across the pasture-land. Somewhere a few miles off flowed the Thames, already wideish and winding, though from here you would never have guessed it. Today the High Ground was being mown, the first time of the year, the donkey in its queer rubber overshoes pulling the clattering mower, steered from behind by one of the men [it’s 1926], who took off his cap to them as he approached. Really you didn’t mow at weekends, but Dudley had ordered it, doubtless so as to annoy his guests. George and Madeleine were strolling on the far side, avoiding the mowing, heads down in talk, perhaps enjoying themselves intheir own way.

This passage serves very well as a skeleton-key to Hollinghurst’s cabinet of wonders: England is very beautiful precisely because of ownership arrangements that, from time to time (if not more often) throw up monsters like Dudley. And on flows the Thames, unseen.  

You will have to excuse me, this morning; I’ll be spending time with this young gentleman. It’s his mother’s birthday, which means that, although she rarely gets a working holiday, the people she depends on often take the day off. So, while Megan participates in a conference call from home, I’ll take Will to the park. It’s not enough to play with him in his own room; ever since whenever, he has demonstrated that he knows when his mother is on the telephone on business — and that he doesn’t like it.

Although perhaps those days are over. He can play for hours now with his trains. When he gets tired of rolling them around on their tracks, he pushes them through the archway in the bridge, say, and sees how far his arm can follow. Or he might explore the many ways in which the trains fit and don’t fit in his other toys. If I were a mathematician, I might propose that Will is deeply involved in set theory these days. It’s quiet work.

I won’t chance it, though; I’ll take the stroller along with me. The air is a bit snappy this morning, perfect for running around the playground.

Later, I will tell you what I thought about J Edgar, or why I found it to be an unpuzzling movie full of puzzlements. If I don’t get run over by a train.

***

But before I get to that, I’d like to tell you how I spent the afternoon, once I returned from the Lower East Side and lunch, for the first time ever (amazing, really, that it has taken so long) at Veselka — where Will’s contentment at the table furthered a sense, adumbated last night over pizza, that he is once again content to sit through a meal at table. Before it was time to head downtown this morning, I read Charles Rosen’s generally favorable review of Roger Nichols’s new biography of Maurice Ravel, in the process of which Rosen characteristically ventured an appreciation of Ravel’s keyboard oeuvre. Fully a quarter of the piece is devoted to Gaspard de la Nuit, about which I have never read anything so cogent.

Gaspard de la Nuit is a suite of three piano pieces that, considering how sinister and difficult-sounding they are, ought to be more demanding, harder to listen to, than they are. You don’t really have to pay attention to the first two, “Ondine” and “Le Gibier”; the first is appropriately bathed in watery ripples, while the ostinato bell tolling at the back of the music works pretty much like moonlight, steady but fascinating just for being there. The final piece, which, as Rosen notes, has “the reputation of being technically one of the most difficult pieces ever written,” is less modest about grabbing attention, but it is never tedious — always the threat posed by “morbid romanticism.” (Rosen applies this phrase to “Le Gibier” only, but I think that it describes Gaspard as a whole.) The suite lasts a little longer than a quarter-hour. Rosen’s program notes made me keen to hear it, and I had no trouble locating the CD of Angela Hewitt’s performance.

When I got home, I went to see what else there was in the cupboard, and quickly found Marta Argerich’s recording. Quickly found it in iTunes, that is; finding the CD was trickier, thanks to my incorrect assumption that it was issued on the Philips label, but I found it (on DG) eventually. Then I discovered that there was no more. No more in iTunes, anyway. So I ran to Arkivmusic to refresh my memory; just the other day, looking for a recording of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 13, I was reminded that I own Daniel Barenboim’s set of all the concertos. But nothing familiar turned up, so I dug deeper in my collection and found two more Gaspards, among copies that I’d made of CDs that I’d given away, back in the days before iTunes playlists — back when I played only my favorite recordings of anything. Well, at least I kept copies. On the visit to Arkivmusic, I picked up recordings by Jean-Yves Thibaudet and Vladimir Ashkenazy.

Hewitt and Argerich play the hell out of Gaspard, but Philippe Entremont’s performance has its moments, and Monique Haas, while not great, is good enough to set a benchmark. Here’s what puzzles me still, though: why have I devoted an afternoon to listening closely to music that, upon increased familiarity, I’m prepared to agree with Charles Rosen in judging “the greatest tone poem of the school of Liszt.” (“Scarbo”) But don’t wait for me to figure this out. Read Rosen and get yourself a recording ( Hewitt’s complete Ravel would be my choice; it’s only two discs). I’ll tell you what Roger Nichols’s book is like when I read it, which, with luck, will be during the Thanksgiving break; I ordered a copy today.

***

Clint Eastwood’s new movie, J Edgar, is a very glum affair. Perhaps it ought to be. It’s not so glum as to be disagreeable to watch, but I’m in no hurry to see it again. Even Leonardo DiCaprio can’t make the FBI director an engaging character; we watch his story because the man had such a baleful effect on our nation’s life. Obsessed, like most conservatives throughout the Western world, by a dread of alien Bolshevist infiltration, Hoover sounded like a time capsule by the time I was growing up, in the Sixties. (For an idea of what I’m talking about, revisit Spike Lee’s deployment of Enver Hoxha’s orations in Inside Man.) Hoover clearly outlived his usefulness by at least 25 years.

Eastwood’s point, of course, isn’t to reconcile us to Hoover’s abuse of office; on the contrary, I think that his film ought to make it more difficult than it is for righteous tones to develop uncritical momentum. In my book, Hoover is an Augustine figure, someone whose sexual peculiarities, combined with a position of authority, inspired a rule book that we’ve found it difficult to live with in the long term. it’s hard to sympathise with the pains, such as they might have been, of those peculiarities. Eastwood shows us the suffering, and Mr DiCaprio certainly projects it, but I found myself feeling the same sort of pity that the site of a cow in an abattoir would rouse. Thwarted love, dented self-awareness — these are the most terrible things that can happen to a free and healthy human being. The fact that the first director of the FBI had to endure them does not make him more attractive. The terrible thing about J Edgar Hoover is how ordinary he was in everything except persistence.

For the moment, the only thing that I want to say about the film is that its sepia coloration is ultimately rebarbative, or at least tiresome. The special effects makeup is hard to overlook. By excising Hoover’s middle age, Eastwood avoids the problem of grading his leading man into prosthesis; we have the young Hoover and the old Hoover, and never the in-between Hoover. The old-man getup is very convincing. Ditto Naomi Watts’s. Alas, I cannot say the same of whatever was done to Armie Hammer, who does such a fine job of playing Hoover’s companion, Clyde Tolson. His old-man look is utterly unpersuasive. At the best, it reminded me of Keir Dullea in 2001. Most of the time, though, I thought of C3PO in a plasma attack. There were moments when Mr Hammer looked like a strange, beautiful-eyed tropical fish in a suit. But he never looked a day over 30. It was most disconcerting. 

Of course you have to see it. I’m hoping that J Edgar will prove to be Clint Eastwood’s warm-up for more interesting mid-century biopics. George Kennan would make a great subject.

Since I’ve never been to the island of Aruba, my System 1, as Daniel Kahneman would call it, is free to invest the name with cognitive associations that have nothing to do with sun and sand. From now on, “Aruba” will trigger memories of the thrilling repudiation of motherhood that newly-widowed Rita Lyons announces to her shocked children toward the end of Nicky Silver’s play, The Lyons. Say “Aruba,” and I will see and hear petite Linda Lavin trumpeting, in that level monotone of hers that can splinter and spark without ever losing its deliberate, awful pace, a liberating post-maternal dismissal that, who knows, better chemistry might have made possible for Medea.  

Among other things, The Lyons is the most satisfying play as a whole that I’ve seen in a very long time. There are lots of great scenes — really, nothing but great scenes — and/but they cohere and lead to a final moment in which everything is resolved. Not for an instant did I think that the writing might have been managed better, and I can’t remember the last time I was entertained with so little personal effort. There’s a terrifying scene in the second act that you know is going to end badly, but your worst fear — that it will end tediously — is brilliantly allayed.

The other remarkable thing about The Lyons is the ferocious consistency of its comic vision. The sheer sweeping funniness of the show, which often banks off toward absurdity but never succumbs to it, dampens the audience’s instinctive need to sympathatise with somebody onstage. Sympathy is strongly discouraged by the playwright, but you’re laughing too hard to mind. This black comedy has a strong human heart, however; not a corpuscle of misanthropy will be found in its bloodstream. The Lyons are a bleak and broken family, but they’re all looking for love and terrified by it at the same time. They’re all hugely alive, even the dying head of the household (Dick Latessa). (There’s hope even for him — in the hell that he’s afraid of, no less.) You may not like any of the Lyons,  but you won’t be alienated by any of them, either, not even by creepy Curtis (Michael Esper). Nicky Silver has found a warm smile of kindness at the end of Edward Albee’s nightmare.

That smile warms the face of Kate Jennings Grant, playing Lyons daughter Lisa. Lisa has just made the profoundly believable discovery — credible both as a truth about human nature and as a bit of wisdom that someone might very well not stumble upon until middle age — that making somebody else happy can make you happy. It doesn’t always; life isn’t that easy. But maybe that’s what her mother ought to have tried to do, instead of trying to love her husband. At least Rita finally has the chance to make herself happy.

Oh, how I hope this show goes to Broadway!

Oops. I neglected to make note of Fido here’s particulars. I was accompanying Ray Soleil and an old friend from Crescent City through the new You-Know-What wing at the Museum. He’s probably not even a Fido.

I had a bit of a major yuk last night. There is nothing yucky about a yuk, and, to avoid confusion, yuks are always major. I learned the term from Fossil Darling, back in the days before I learned the danger of adopting his usages. The grown-up equivalent for “major yuk” is “fit of uncontrollable laughter.” I remember the first one; it hit me in eighth grade, reading Robert Benchley’s “What Is Humor — a Joke?” I did not read it in The New Yorker, where it appeared eleven years before I was born, but many, many major yuks have since been ignited by funny pieces appearing in that magazine’s pages, and last night’s was not an exception.

It was Bruce McCall’s parody of Jill Abramson’s Puppy Diaries. McCall has demonstrated, in recent decades, that he can be as funny with his pen as he is with his brushes. It is undoubtedly easier to write something down than to render it graphically, at least if you already have McCall’s smiling sense of the absurd. The parody, “Pet Books Proliferate,” was not immediately alluring, and I did not begin the first little story (there are three), “Tess, the Orphaned Earthworm,” with any anticipation of cathartic hilarity. I hummed along with a slight smile as the narrator, a housewife, unearthed some bait from her husband’s fishing tackle and adopted it as a pet, deciding that it was a she and calling her Empress Maria Theresa, “Tess for short — after the driving force behind the Diet of Worms. A lame joke, I admit, but love will do that to you; you say and do the silliest things.”

A lame joke? It can barely crawl. The last Diet of Worms — not the most famous one, but the one after that — was convened in 1545, almost three hundred years before Maria Theresa succeeded her father and sparked the War of the Austrian Succession. But what it lacks in wit it makes up for in cheek. Think of Ruth Draper’s Mrs Clancy, who wraps up the interruption of acquiring a new dog by telling her children that it would be “lovely” to name the animal after Dante, in honor of her Italian Lesson, “and we’ll call him Dan for short. Here, Danny Danny Danny. Oh, you is such a sweet Danny.” In the context of Draper’s extended recreation of a sophisticated New York society woman, Dan for short is such a quick swerve from the piously learned to the daily vulgate that it has the decompressive force of a bomb. “Tess for short” hasn’t got the same traction, but it scattered the seeds of an explosion — “lame joke” sprinkled a few more — that went off a few seconds after I read the last line of this lugubrious tale. “A few hours later, still sobbing, I carried the dangling little question mark of charred gristle that had been my Tess out to the back flower bed and gently lowered her into the earth whence she had come.”

I chuckled; I chuckled again a few times. Then I was roaring, helplessly. The absurdity of it all! The absurdity of it all, that is, corseted in the whalebone of exquisitely chosen language and made to strut about like Margaret Dumont. In between falling in love with and naming Tess, the narrator quotes from Marjorie Maude Falstaff’s “touching memoir, ‘My Life with Bert the Wonder Dew Worm’.”

O faithful earthworm, silently churning and aerating deep in the loam of the earth, that plant life my flourish! Thou hast done more good for mankind than all the dogs every whelped.

There is something very funny in the threat that these two short but florid sentences make of never coming to an end. Spare me, you automatically beg; the very word “thou” is no longer supportable. And McCall promptly does spare you, moving right on to the Diet of Worms.

I called Fossil, but after two rings I remembered that he was out for the evening. I didn’t leave a message.

For the sake of the mortification of my flesh, I am reading James Wolcott’s memoir, Lucking Out. Ordinarily, the reviews, with their references to Norman Mailer and to New York’s sometime gritty downtown scene &c, would have put me off, having reminded me once again that, if I did have to spend a decade in exile, at least it was the 1970s — the city’s Buttcrack Decade. It was in the Seventies that James Wolcott became a journalist. I can’t say that I ever decided not to be a journalist, but a disinclination was already in place by the time I was graduated from Notre Dame in 1970. It came down to this: I didn’t like the kind of people who were journalists. (The feeling was mutual.)

Instead, the effect of the reviews of Lucking Out was to make me wonder if this was still the case. Lucking Out seemed to be a good test: turning its pages, would I be suffused with regret at paths not taken? Would I wish that I’d had a little more backbone, and followed my dreams? Would I have liked to be one of the cool kids? I’ll let Wolcott answer the question.

There was another home-brewed brand of criticism practiced at the Voice — informal, unsolicited feedback that was delivered like a body check in hockey and intended to put you on notice. It was not uncommon for a fellow writer, in a warrior spirit of collegiality, to let you know that the piece that ran in last week’s issue or the new one teed up in the galleys carried the risk of making you look like a fool. Not simply mistaken, not merely misguided, but a fool — a dupe who made everybody else look bad. One year at the Voice Christmas party, a columnist in ambush mode, having filled his tank to excess capacity with holiday cheer, intercepted me, even though I was standing still, to put me wise that a campaign piece I had done about a presidential candidate that was set to run proved that I didn’t know a thing about politics and if it were published I would look like a fool and the editors would look like fools, a diatribe/dire prediction he delivered so close up his face nearly went out of focus. He was telling me this for my own good, he said, but nobody at the Voice ever told you anything for your own good unless they were up to no good. Another Voice staffer, whom nobody dared call a fool for fear he’d do a calypso number on their heads with his fists, speculated that the weaponized use of the word was rooted in Old Left discourse, evidenced by how often Voice writers would quote August Beble’s pronouncement “Anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools,” one of those thudnering dicta certainly inteded to stop an adversary dead in his rhino tracks. … Or perhaps “fool” simply caught on in the office because some alpha force began using it and everyone else added it to their repertoire, just as so many writers picked up on Ellen Willis’s use of “cranky” as a positive descriptive, indicating someone out of sorts with the prevailing political norms. Whatever its origin in the lingua franca, “fool” was a strangely shame-laced word, intended to make you feel like an object of ridicule based on the snickers and scowls of some invisible jury. … I resented being bullyragged for making a fool of myself because making a fool of yourself was one of the hard-earned liberties Norman Mailer had fought for in his boxing trunks. but I have to say, I don’t regret my days in gladiator school. Having your ego slapped around a bit helped the blood circulate and would prove a superb conditioning program for a future sub-career in blogging, where a tough hide would come in handy every time the Hellmouth opened. Every time I’m abused online with a battery of scurrilous remarks of a personal nature, I’m able to let them bounce off like rubber erasers, having been called an asshole by professionals, experts in the field.

In short: No. No, I do not wish that I had become a journalist in the Seventies. If for no other reason: weigh and consider the violence implicit in this passage! Quite aside from the danger of calypso numbers and other manifestations of actual physical aggression, Wolcott attests to a blood-soaked state of mind that conceives of journalism as a schoolyard scrimmage. A schoolyard scrimmage, I hasten to add, that’s of no interest to non-partipants with better things to attend to. (I excised a reference to Carrie.) Having been called an asshole by professionals is unfortunately no protection against actually being one, and those who celebrate the glories of the Buttcrack Decade are perhaps uniquely destined to live in it.

***

Having been going to the movies in my semi-professional way for a few years now, on almost every Friday morning, I have developed two handy precepts. First, I don’t go to movies that I would expect to dislike. (“No action figures” covers a lot of territory, if you include comic books.) By ruling out egregiously antipathetic experiences, the first rule makes it easy to follow the second, which is to try to enjoy each movie as it was intended to be enjoyed. What kind of movie did the filmmaker want to make? I ask myself that. It is rarely a difficult question to answer. Sometimes, it’s true, a movie tries to be two or more things at the same time, resulting in a degree of incoherence. But I don’t have a problem with a degree of incoherence.  I’ve also acquired a third insight, from thinking about the recent films of Woody Allen: a movie is a magic show, a display of wonders. Every good movie is both a spectacle and a joke. Well, almost every good movie.

I thought of these rules while watching Tower Heist last week. The movie itself did not inspire these thoughts, or any other thoughts; it was Anthony Lane’s unfavorable review that raised the issue. I understand that a film critic is expected to sit through movies that he or she doesn’t care for, although why this should be so is hard to figure. Who would be the poorer if The New Yorker took no notice of Tower Heist. We might all be the poorer for missing this dandy dismissal of Brett Ratner’s “style”: “The origins of his style are unclear, but the influence of, say, early Fellini is less easy to detect than that of Cuisinart.” Okay, that’s funny. Why not just say that, and then move on to something else?

Tower Heist aims to be a lot of fun, and it succeeds. It tries to do several things at the same time, and it would objectionably incoherent if coherence were an element of Brett Ratner’s style, but it isn’t; Tower Heist is a deeply untroubled motion picture. Tower Heist takes place in an alternative New York that New Yorkers will probably appreciate more than most. A good deal of the movie’s spectacle, and its biggest joke, concerns the staff at The Tower, a luxury residence on Columbus Circle. The movie uses the Trump Tower — built as the Gulf & Western Building in 1970 —as its location; one part of the joke is that its battalion of impeccable service providers would be more likely to be found next door, at the new Mayflower. Another part of the joke is that, while the highly-skilled maids and doormen marshalled by Josh Kovacs (Ben Stiller) do exist — flourish — in our fair city, the movie’s tenantry seems imported from Los Angeles. They’re much too nice. Fortunately, Arthur Shaw (Alan Alda), the richest of all the residents, and the man entrusted with investing the staff’s pension fund, is nice only on the surface; scratch his enamel, and he’s a bastard. When Shaw turns out to have been running a Ponzi scheme, the director knows how to rouse the audience’s inner Astoria, and we rejoice when justice is done, as it is, very sweetly. The only thing that Tower Heist lacks is a bigger, a much bigger part for Téa Leoni, who plays the FBI Special Agent who’s in charge of nabbing Shaw. At the very least, Tower Heist ought to have ended as 16 Blocks did, “two years later.” Josh and Claire ought to have had that Saturday-night date after all.

As to Anthony Lane’s diatribe/dire prediction about the future of the movies in an age of VOD, I can only say that I go to the movies in the morning because the audiences are small; more than once, I’ve been the only member. I like going to the movies principally for the popcorn (no butter), and I always take an aisle seat because I can’t make it through a feature film without a visit to the men’s room. If I were conscious of an imperative to “surrender our will,” I’d stay away. Lane is arguably the funniest writer to to have been published by The New Yorker in my lifetime, but he does have his hobby-horses. I prefer to encounter them at home, which is where I also get to know the movies I love; the element of compulsion that kept me in my seat during his homage to Ava Gardner at a bygone New Yorker festival was disagreeable. But it was theatre, in its way, and I’m glad that rules in effect since the Athens of Aeschylus are in force during staged performances. But the movies? Forget about it.

After brunch on Saturday, my friend Eric took me for a walk along the High Line, which I found to be exactly as photographed. (Also, on a bright November weekend afternoon, very crowded.) As I took the photograph of the London Terrace, above, I thought of the similar picture that Kathleen took on her first visit, two years ago. The only surprise was that it took no time at all to walk the twenty-odd blocks’ length that has been developed so far. This was partly because we didn’t have to stop at every corner, of course, but it was mostly because I was quite bottomlessly interested by the conversation that Eric and I were having.

When I got home, I changed clothes and got to work on all my regualar Saturday-afternoon chores; then, in the evening, we crossed town to have dinner with Fossil Darling, Ray Soleil, and an old friend from New Orleans whom I’m hoping to show, tomorrow, the newly-opened Gallery Formerly Known As The Islamic Wing. As a result of all this activity, which followed a week of irregular amounts of running around, I was fairly depleted yesterday morning, but it wasn’t that that kept us home all day. Kathleen, even more depleted, after an unusually demanding week,  than I, succumbed to an incommoding intestinal disorder. So we did not get to go downtown to take Will out for a walk to the park. That was a disappointment all round.

I was saving the High Line for a gloomy weekday in February, when the whole project was complete. “Now I’ve ruined it for you,” lamented Eric when I confessed this plan. “Not at all,” I replied, “It’s still not finished.”  I do want to see it in wet, wintry weather, when the ghost of what it used to be will be most apparent.

***

Over the weekend, I read an Op-Ed piece by Ross Douthat that elicited my unqualified assent. In “Our Reckless Meritocracy,” Douthat argues that, while hereditary aristocracies undermine themselves by acting stupidly, and totalitarian tyrants founder on foolish obsessions, meritocracies are at risk from inexperienced conceit.

Convinced that their own skills are equal to any task or challenge, meritocrats take risks than lower-wattage elites would never even contemplate, embark on more hubristic projects, and become infatuated with statistical models that hold out the promise of a perfectly rational and frictionless world.

I only wish that he’d gone a little further, and taken a poke at the metrics that advance our meritocrats — the pointless examinations that test all sorts of secondary skills (such as rote memory, docility, and thinking inside the box) that can be measured, while ignoring deliberative judgment altogether. The accent on testing produces an engineering cast of mind that effectively forestalls the discovery, without formal schooling, of the unexpected lines of thought that lead to wisdom.

***

It’s hard to believe, as Philip Lopate reminds us, that the High Line was built in the Thirties (that recently), but I can vouch for the accuracy of that statement that immediately follows, in his Design Observer essay, “Above Grade: On the High Line.” “A mere 30 years later it was deemed obsolete…” I wouldn’t have known why it was obsolete, but I could see that it was, from the passenger seat of my father’s car, as we crawled along the old elevated West Side Highway, commuting to and from our Wall Street jobs. As something of a railroad buff, I morosely collected examples of disused railway in the metropolitan area. Nothing, in the middle Sixties, seemed as doomed to irrelevance as trains. But then everything about that part of town was sadly derelict in those days, included the highway itself, which would be the elevated road that got demolished. I still can’t believe, quite, that people live there now. Which, of course, only a few do — compared to the crowds that will populate the new buildings certain to sprout alongside the new, prairial promenade.

In the end, as all the more astute reviewers have pointed out, Blue Nights is about the double-faced problem of outliving one’s friends and relations. You mourn, and you fall apart. Joan Didion captures the awfulness of it pretty well in just one (incomplete) sentence: “Sitting in frigid waiting rooms trying to think of the name and telephone number of the person I want notified in case of an amergency.” So far as remaining family is concerned, she can choose between a brother who lives in California and a nephew who makes movies and is frequently “on location.”

Kathleen is at a funeral, this morning, of a woman who died last weekend of a cerebral hemorrhage. She was in her late seventies, and until the massive stroke felled her, she enjoyed perfect health. She wasn’t taking so much as a single prescription drug. She’d had a very happy summer with her family, and was just now settling into the fall routine. Instead, she came to a swift end. That is one way to die — I can’t help thinking that it’s the best way to die, although it’s immediately shattering to the family. Last spring, the mother of another friend died of a cancer that was quick for cancer but certainly not swift. Was that less shattering? These things can’t be compared. In the Bronx, the mother of a third friend goes on and on, an invalid for decades now, complaining, ailing, still holding onto her spot in this vale of tears.

But I digress. Joan Didion isn’t talking about different ways of dying. She would insist that she knows nothing about dying, and suggest rather that what she is not talking about, in Blue Nights, is different ways of surviving, ways of surviving the different ways in which people die. Her husband died suddenly, like the woman whose funeral Kathleen is attending — although, in the case of John Gregory Dunne, there were plenty of warnings, plenty of cardiac interventions. His death had a conventional, almost admirably masculine quality about it. They knew it was coming, and, when it came, it was fast. The death of Joan Didion’s daughter, Quintana Roo, however, remains completely mysterious. It began with what seemed to a flu, passed quickly into deadly infection, and wound up with — what, brain death? We don’t spend anything like the time that The Year of Magical Thinking devoted to hospital-type situations. Didion had plenty of time to mourn her daughter before her daughter died. Then — this is another mystery; perhaps all these thoughts about adoption had gathered before — she thought about the motherhood that did not die when Quintana Roo died, and that is what Blue Nights is about. It was an odd motherhood in many ways, most of them touched only glancingly in the memoir. The one matter that Didion feels her way into is the unpleasant surprise of having trouble coming up with the name and telephone number of someone to call in case of emergency.

It’s a very sobering read, at least for someone my age. I’m only about fifteen years younger than Joan Didion, and, being a man, I will probably fall apart sooner. Heavens, I’ve been falling apart since my mid-thirties; that’s when the ankylosing spondylitis set in. (My reward for stopping smoking, come to think of it.)  I even enjoyed a stretch of Proustian invalidism while convalescing from a serious (long-neglected) bout of mononucleiosis in college.

In the kitchen, I stow the meat slicer on a high shelf. It is not a lightweight appliance. I have no trouble reaching it down, now. I wonder how long that will be the case; I wonder each time I reach it down. I keep my cellphone in my pocket at all times — except, of course, when it’s charging, and when, as right now, I forget to unplug it in the morning. I shall probably make it into the bedroom alive. But the thought of Joan Didion lying on the floor of her apartment, unable to reach any of the thirteen telephones in her house, has haunted me from the instant I read it. I know what that’s like. (My reward for giving up martinis.) And I hate to think, not of death and dying so much, but of the time when either Kathleen or I will have to find the name and telephone number of someone else to contact in case of emergency.

At dinner, after the play, it occurred to me that one explanation for the audience’s oddly tepid response to Zoe Kazan’s We Live Here, which we had just seen, toward the end of its run, at MTC, might be that the playwright forced the material for two rather different plays into a comedy-drama that runs for about two hours with intermission. Regular theatre-goers are all too familiar with the kind of show that begins with an awkward but funny family reunion, steadily leaks laugh lines, and bumps to a stop in soap-opera recriminations. Whatever the name for this dramatic form, Kazan has composed an excellent exemplar; We Live Here is an admirably well-made play, especially for a debut. The characters are intriguing and their secrets, strategically revealed, always turn out to be slightly different from their foreshadowing. But theatregoers have arguably had enough of this sort of thing, and, after all (sad to say), the extraordinary cast featured only one big name. There is much to like in We Live Here, but most of the members of last night’s audience wasn’t in the mood to look for it on their own.

They might have been more enticed, as I say, had Zoe Kazan cleared her work of one of her two stories and expanded the surviving one — and then, gone back and done the opposite. (We might even have had a double show, like Alan Ayckbourn’s House and Garden, performend simultaneously in adjacent theatres, with some but not all of the characters running back and forth between the two productions.) One play would be about the inability of two “happily married parents” to cope with their gifted children, at least one of whom is depressive. This play would expand on the Greek-myths angle that Kazan worked rather well into her textures; it would tell us more about a Harvard classics professor (Mark Blum) who is dumb enough to name his twin daughters Althea (Jessica Collins) and Andromeda, and about his wife (Amy Irving) who, deeply uninterested in scholarship of any kind, thinks the names are cute. This play would be about tempting fate, and fate’s taking up the challenge with a vengeance.

The other play would be about the fraught relations between the daughters, and this play would have more room for the men in their lives, two very different men who never had the chance, in We Live Here, to stand up to one another. Sandy (Jeremy Shamos), Althea’s fiancé, is such a good man that his prospective mother-in-law finds him “a bit gay.” Daniel (Oscar Isaac) is, in contrast, the sexy boy next door who is totally bad news; he comes equipped with that engine of destruction, a motorcycle. Stripped of the parents’ presence, the recognition scene in which Allie learns that Daniel has moved in on her younger sister, Dinah (Betty Gilpin), now “all grown up,” might have been incandescent, and not the occasion for a stagy blackout.

In the alternative (to splitting her play in two), Kazan might have insisted on a, shall we say, more Greek setting, and not the sprawling, many-chambered family home that bore the impress of a recent upgrade from television sitcom to legitimate theatre. Especially not a set so loaded with visual distractions. John Lee Beatty’s work, as usual, we eloquent, but that’s the problem: it constituted a mini-essay on the play, such that there was no need for any acting by people. Aspiration — books aplenty, the tail end of a grand piano, an easel painter’s kit — floated uneasily above middlebrow inattentiveness to detail; the boxes from Crate & Barrel served as more than ostensible wedding presents, and a marionette operation, in which they contrived to open themselves when the bride wasn’t present, would not have been ineffective at scoring the playwright’s main points. (I complained to Kathleen that there was not a single crave-worthy object on the stage; although I did fall into unwilling fascination with a Civil-War era armchair composed of tapestry and carved wood.) And the doors! Aside from the front door (nicely used), there were two sets of interior glass-paned doors and two ponderous pocket doors, one of which was briefly closed, the other of which was presented in half, thrust out toward the audience. I had no idea how six actors could fill such a space, and it turned out that they couldn’t. The best scene — the fiancé, trying to loosen up his sister-in-law-to-be, so that he can paint her portrait, asks Dinah about the things that she likes, and Betty Gilpin delivers a thrilling monologue of despair, desire, and barely-contained madness that howls for full-length dramatic treatment — the best scene takes place in a small corner of the domestic barn, the rest of which is momentarily consigned, by lighting director Ben Stanton, to darkness.  

I’d vote for the divided play, and the one with the parents could keep the complicated set. Amy Irving, reminding me at every turn of Dianne Wiest, was not the monster mom that might have tempted her with histrionic possibilities, but, more effectively, a parent who has come to terms, more or less, with her failures — and she has you wondering if that’s really a good thing. There isn’t time for Mark Blum to do more than deliver, very ably, some telling remarks on Aristotle and hamartia while looking chastened by the gods. There was a good story there, about how the plodding classics scholar caught the vibrant beauty, and how perhaps the relationship, like many Olympian ones, ought perhaps not to have produced offspring. Jerry Shamos did a great job with the thankless nice-guy role, while Oscar Isaac squirmed and jiggled as if sex itself were going to rip out of him, Aliens-style. It was the sisters, however, who owned the show. Where had I seen Jessica Collins before? This hugely distracting question bothered me throughout the first act; it wasn’t until the intermission that I could read that she starred in the ill-fated serial drama, Rubicon. Happily, I could give her second-act flashback into sullen, slutty adolescence, a master turn, my individed attention. Betty Gilpin I was well-prepared to admire; her performance in That Face is one of my most pungent theatrical memories. She did not disappoint, to say the least. At the end, after an eternity of wary circling and fake smiles, she and Ms Collins demonstrated that only the two sisters could put an end to the family curse.

***

For weeks, I’ve been asking the nice people at Crawford Doyle for a copy of Joan Didion’s Blue Nights, and, for weeks, they’ve been telling me that the book hasn’t come out yet. I finally joked that, by the time the book was actually published, I’d have read most of it in reviews. Blue Nights is a slim, somewhat gnomic volume, as you would expect, and I knew that my joke wasn’t the exaggeration that it might be. But it was the review that I read at lunch, yesterday, right before heading over to the bookshop for the now-available memoir, that surprised me with an almost unimaginable anecdote from Didion’s daughter’s childhood, extracted by Mary-Kay Wilmers in the LRB. Here’s the original:

I recall taking her, when she was four or five, up the coast to Oxnard to see Nicholas and Alexandra. On the drive home from Oxnard she referred to the czar and czarina as “Nicky and Sunny,” and said, when asked how she liked the picture, “I think it’s going to be a big hit.”

It turns out that there’s quite a lot of this vaguely Mommie Dearest material in Blue Nights, this time presented by Mommie, and I wonder how long it will be before a hailstorm of denunciation befalls Joan Didion. Premature viewing of a traumatically wound-up family saga cannot be causally linked to the fatal infection (or whatever it was) that killed Quintana Roo Dunne Michael, two years after her marriage, in 2005. But what about the disagnosis of “borderline personality disorder”? I doubt that anything in Blue Nights is going to dim my ardor for the rippling sinews and snapping tendons of Joan Didion’s art. But. “when she was four or five”? 

Linda Colley’s Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837, which seems to have been a Times notable book when it came out, originally, in the Nineties, has appeared in a second edition, which I’m enjoying hugely, although I only found out about it from a recommendation by Amazon. (People who bought Jeremy Black’s George III bought Colley’s book as well, and I can see why.) Above and beyond the historical instruction, Britons affords some irresistibly good writing.

All aristocracies have a strong military tradition, and for many British patricians the protracted warfare of this period was a godsend. It gave them a job and, more important, a purpose, an opportunity to carry out what they had been trained to do since childhood: ride horses, fire guns, exercise their undoubted physical courage and tell other people what to do.

It doesn’t get any better than that. Yesterday, I encountered an equally precious gem, although it’s inadvertently marvelous and not by Colley herself. A Tory divine called Richard Polwhele urged ladies to remember that “the crimsoning blush of modesty, will always be more attractive than the sparkle of confident intelligence.” I couldn’t disagree more; I’m like the dude in Last Picture Show who tells Cybill Shepherd to come back when she’s got her virginity fixed. The “crimsoning blush” fixation is what finally made it impossible for me to read Trollope; he’s so into crimsoning blushes and girls’ modesty that it begins to sound like child abuse. I don’t think that there’s anything sexier than the sparkle of confident intelligence, which is why I’m looking forward to seeing Stockard Channing in Other Desert Cities. We have tickets for my birthday.

Depleted — c’est le mot juste! Thank you, Daniel Kahneman. I’m not sick, I’m not really even tired. I did drink a tad too much wine last night, more than I’m now used to drinking. I spent almost the entire day yesterday catching up with feeds on Google Reader; it’s difficult to imagine anything more depleting. In any case, I’m going to spend today repleting.

At some point, I must say a word about the two movies that I’ve seen recently but not written up — not written up because, by Friday afternoon, I am no longer quietly at home, but running errands for the weekend. I have my stay-at-home days and my out-and-about days, and the latter cluster toward the weekend, with the result that I am depleted at the beginning of the week. (If I’m depleted today, I was even more depleted yesterday.) For example, this past Friday I was determined to mail out the new round of postcards of Will on the beach this summer. The project was so overdue that it had to be done at once. This meant that I had to go out again, late in the afternoon, to buy Dymo labels that I didn’t know I’d run out of. What drove me crazy about this errand was that I could have done it in the morning when, finding that I’d shown up at the movie theatre forty minutes early (this is what happens when you’re depleted: you forget to check Movie Showtimes before leaving the house [and I see now that I was depleted at the end of last week]), I quickly ran a round of errands that could have easily included a stop at Staples. Had I thought to do so, of course, I wouldn’t have bought a new paper shredder, which I did do in the afternoon, thus necessitating a walk straight home and a separate outing to Fairway — all very depleting. It’s depleting just to read about this!

It’s just one of the many things that they didn’t teach us when we were young, viz, that you can’t get anything done properly without being adequately rested. This was as true when I was twenty as it is now, but I was like most twenty year-olds a shambolism of inattentiveness when it came to personal management.

So, enough depletion.

***

The movies were Margin Call and The Rum Diary.  I enjoyed them both very much, but my thoughts about writing them up were scrambled by all the Pauline Kael that has been in the air lately. When the Library of America collection of Kael’s reviews was announced, I thought about buying it. I remembered how sharply I had disagreed with Kael during her New Yorker days, not so much with individual judgments as with her general world-view, which, all too apparently, did not take in the place I call home. Just hearing her name revives wearying waves of pointless dismissals of bourgeois this and bourgeois that, made in case after case by utterly bourgeois writers who would have traded in a limb to cleanse themselves of their bourgeois provenance. Paul Kael was certainly one such. Like so many critics coming from the Left, she failed to see that almost everyone in America, aside from smarty-pants like herself, who did not already belong to the bourgeoisie was keen to do so, and that the mission to educate the uneducated into a state of utopian transcendentalism was trans-Quixotic. It’s people like Kael who did everything but lick Reagan’s welcome-mat clean.

I don’t think that Kael would have liked either of the movies in today’s hopper. She wouldn’t have liked Margin Call at all, and she would have wanted more Deppness in The Rum Diary. There is nothing in The Rum Diary that wasn’t presented in sharper focus in Public Enemy, and there was a lot more Deppness in The Tourist, that underrated romp in which two of Hollywood’s biggest Big Stars completely, and with hambones dangling from their mouths, upstage Venice. The Rum Diary is clearly a valentine from its star to his idol, soul brother, and sometime housemate, the late Hunter S Thompson, and this makes it more of a literary work than a movie. Qua movie, it’s composed of worthwhile scraps of other movies, covering a range from the Bournes to Body Heat. If you had to say something nasty, you could say that it is The Quiet American without the everything. What it really needs is not so much Deppness as Ribisiness: everything that has ever made you raise your eyebrows in amazement that Giovanni Ribisi ever got into the movies (with that squeaky voice especially) is given the mighty Wurlitzer treatment here, and you want more of it. You also want more of Amber Heard’s dress-up doll act; rarely — not since Now, Voyager, anyway — has an actress been rendered, within the context of one movie, so protean by makeup. Aaron Eckhart is his usual, cool-cucumber-gorged-python self; you have to wonder where he goes to get bank loans. But, hey, it’s a fun movie, as guilty a pleasure as raiding the minibar. The LSD trip taken by the hero and his sidekick, Sala (Michael Rispoli), is a masterpiece of articulate understatement that manages to convey the dynolysergic experience with only one loony special effect at the start; the natural look and feel of a fishing pier on a breezy, somewhat foggy night is just about as accurate a postcard as director Bruce Robinson could have sent from the late great’s gonzo files.

It’s interesting to reflect that Aaron Eckhart is not in Margin Call. You might at first wonder how a movie about Wall Street sleaziness was made without him, but the very point J C Chador’s astonishing directorial debut seems to be that Wall Street sleaziness is committed by people who aren’t very sleazy. Breezy, yes. Paul Bettany is, as it were, the reason why Aaron Eckhart isn’t in Margin Call. His character, Will Emerson, is a Brit who sends a piece of his winnings home to his folks and spends the rest on laddie equipment. He’s pumped by his income, not by master-of-the-universe powers that he doesn’t seem to believe in anyway. He likes being very well paid. He likes it well enough to risk never being paid again. He is a salesman, not a con man. If there’s a difference.

What Pauline Kael wouldn’t have liked about Margin Call, I believe, is that it is ultimately a filmed play. This isn’t to suggest that it suffers from the airlessness of that unfortunate genre. It’s only afterward, when you ask yourself what made the experience so powerful, so shattering, so overwhelming but in the end so satisfying, that you realize that the film’s production values — sets, lighting, and so forth — have been just good enough not to call attention to themselves while at the same time providing the perfect stage for outstanding theatrical performances. I’m not sure that Margin Call, even with its excellent cast (many of whom, and certainly the two principals, Jeremy Irons and Kevin Spacey, are stage actors of the very first rank), would be as effective in a Broadway theatre, but for all I know it might be twice as effective. I vote for the movie treatment because the story is already so claustrophobic — more than three-quarters of the action takes place during a very long night in largely empty offices perched too high atop Manhattan to feel attached to anything — that it needs the atmospheric rush, paradoxically more persuasive in the movies than in the theatre, of the morning ride across the East River that Will and Seth Bregman (Penn Badgley) take to round up Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci) at his Brooklyn Heights doorstep. The exhilaration of speeding across the Brooklyn Bridge in a convertible sportscar after an pulling an all-nighter at work is something that you appreciate in the audience every bit as much as the two bankers, one of whom knows, by the way, that he is about to be let go.

For some reason, the marketing angle on this film focused on Peter Sullivan and Mr Badgley, as if, I suppose, to bring in younger audiences. But they are the least important figures in the film precisely because they’re so young. At mid-range, you have characters, played by Demi Moore, Simon Baker, and Mr Tucci, as well as Mr Bettany (don’t let me forget Aasif Mandvi),  complicated people who are very ambivalent about the risks that they take at work. And, at the top, you have the head trader, played by Kevin Spacey, and the head banker, played by Jeremy Irons, uncoiling at full length the helices of their personal mystery (they are mysteries to themselves) while the actors themselves, well-known to you as they are, show you things that you’ve never seen.Their appearing on the screen, and not onstage, signals their immense powers of destruction; what’s wrong with modern banking is that it hasn’t taken place entirely in the movies.

***

In the interests of repletion, I have set one of my Nanos to play the Bach in Order II playlist, and it is repleting me nicely. Ralph Kirkpatrick plays the English Suites, Andras Schiff plays the Partitas, and Maria Tipo plays the Goldberg Variations. The Cello Suites are played by Pierre Fournier. The Corelli Concerti Grossi are performed very deliberately by an outfit called Ensemble 415. As I write, the late Scott Ross is dashing through the Italian Concerto. (With all the things that people have done to and with Bach’s music, I’ve never heard a “fleshed out” concerto version, with orchestra, of this piece.)

The postcards reached local destinations very quickly. We had dinner with a friend last night who, earlier in the day, encountered another friend of ours as he was walking down 72nd Street. She told him that she had just received a postcard of Will; he kept his miffed-ness at not being able to say the same to himself. When he got home and collected his mail, though, there it was. Small town.