Right on schedule, Fairway opened its latest branch here in Yorkville today, and I paid the first of Nⁿ visits. I bought two items, a quart of milk (needed) and a pound of Kona (also needed). Getting a pricetag for the Kona was problematic; in fact, it was impossible. The computer wouldn’t recognize the PLU. So the clerks and the sub-manager devised a sort of written math problem involving two vessels  — don’t ask me, but Ray Soleil thought that it was pretty clever. In case you’re wondering, the Kona is not a bargain, at $39.95; late, lamented Rohr’s, the tea- and coffee-shop that closed a month or so ago, used to sell it for $31. But Rohr’s isn’t in business anymore, is it? Before he ran into the computer problem, the clerk wanted to be sure that I knew how much the coffee was going to cost. What can one do? It’s the best coffee on earth.

The closest I have ever come to a Fairway store in the past is as a years-long FreshDirect customer. FreshDirect was founded, I believe, by a former Fairway partner who left in a huff to start his own business, or words to that effect. But a little of the Fairway gloss glittered on my FreshDirect boxes. FreshDirect used to sell Kona, but it stopped, just as it stopped selling a lot of the special groceries that kept me coming back. Finally it was no better than the brilliant specialty markets that have been in the neighborhood for years, Agata & Valentina and Eli’s. By that time, I’d learned that the last thing I needed was boxes of food delivered once a week. I need small bags of food purchased every day. Every day. I won’t mind, now that there’s Fairway.

On the way home, neighbors on a lower floor who have for years been regular customers at the mother ship, on the West Side, assured me that it’s always going to be like that in there, meaning crowd scenes suggestive of a bus station in an earthquake, with just a hint of menace that the whole place is about to flip over like the Poseidon. I predict that guidebooks will soon be directing Museum tourists to the other end of 86th Street, before or after the art, for a look at New Yorkers in the raw. By local standards, Fairway is immense, with sky-high shelves stocked with unimaginable variety  — unimaginable to Manhattanites, that is. What’s on the shelves will only elicit yawns from sophisticated out-of-towners, especially those within driving distance of a Wegman’s. But the clientèle may take their breath away. If opening day is any indication, the West Side store’s celebrated atmosphere of crazed-grandmas-on-steroids-death -match-roller-derby has been piped into the new store as well.

No matter how hard you beg, the clerks are not going to let you leave by the entryway. You have at least to go around the produce shelves and past the checkout counters. I had hardly walked in when I heard at least two whimpering young men all but pleading entrapment, as though they’d stepped through the door unaware that food was for sale (surely anyplace so happening — see that TV truck? — must be selling Apples) and now wanted only to turn on the heels. Not allowed!

It’s not the exotic variety that I’m after. I don’t mind walking a few blocks to buy something unusual. What I want right across the street, when I need it because, damn it, I thought I had another bottle in the cupboard — and am now going to get — is superb produce and amply-stocked staples. Fairway has turned the local Food Emporium, and, to a lesser extend, the better-run Gristede’s, into dodgy convenience stores. Indeed, I can’t imagine how Food Emporium will last a year. We shall see.

I was not too superior to accept one of the maps that those exit-forbidding clerks were handing out. The key to the aisles has three columns, “traditional,” “organic,” and “specialty.” There’s a kind of honey in each category, and they’re all in different parts of the lower level (along with a tripartition of jams). There are also sodas in all three categories. But what about “specialty organic”? Don’t tell me that Fairway is missing something!

Next Day Update: This time, I went to shop, with a list of ingredients for dinner. I stuck to it, too; the only extras were a ripe avocado (ready to eat! what a concept!) and some of Kathleen’s preferred yoghurt. Some of the items on my list were “specialty” — wild rice, for example — while I was also on the lookout for “traditional” (that is, ordinary) ice cream bars and fruit pops. And then, some beautiful green beans and small button mushrooms. I can’t remember the last time that everything on my list — even a short one like today’s — could be purchased under one roof. And the bill came to pennies more (pennies!) than the cost of a pound of Kona. (A quarter of that went for the wild rice.)

My latest problem is: Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletins. These quarterly publications pile up! I’ve got nearly a foot of them. That’s a lot of shelf space, if you’re wondering. And I don’t have it. Not for the Bulletins.

Aside from the occasional issue devoted to recent acquisitions, each quarterly bulletin is devoted to one theme: the art of a region, a period, or even of one particular artist. Occasionally, the Museum resorts to bulletin format for minor catalogues, as was the case when Vermeer’s Milkmaid paid a visit from the Rijksmuseum. The format blends light-handed scholarship with texts that the educated general reader will find informative and well-written. But I have yet to encounter a Bulletin that tells me everything I want to know about work that already interests me, and Ican think of only one instance when a Bulletin sent me to a part of the Museum that I’d never been to before in search of works that I hadn’t thought I’d care much about. I ought to read the Bulletins as they come in; that goes without saying. But it would take eight to ten people to get through the stuff that I ought to read. At my pace, anyway. 

So they pile up, unread for the most part. Here, from Summer 2001: Ars Vitraria: Glass in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I don’t know quite how to approach it. It looks like a high-end catalogue of gifts that happen not to be for sale, but there are a few stained-glass windows that have nothin,g beyond their common material, to do with anything else in the book. One of the windows comes from Rouen Cathedral (!) “Theodosius Arrives at Ephesus (Scene from the Legend of the Seven Sleepers),” it’s called. The accompanying passage provides dates for Emperor Theodosius II (a long reign, 408-50) and recites the legend (the sleepers were persecuted Christians who had been tucked into a comfy cave in the Third Century, miraculously resurrected). We’re also told that the panels, of which this is just one, were dismantled and rearranged in the Rayonnant style to fit the lancet windows of side-chapels that were added to the cathedral, presumably in a way that blocked off (or opened up) the panels’ original windows. As a result, the original composition “of cluster medallions against a mosaic ground, like the contemporary windows at Chartres,” has been lost. Very interesting!

In most cases, if I want to see an item that’s written up in the Bulletin, and it belongs to the Museum, I have only to walk down the street, but a glance at Theodosius arriving in Ephesus will require a trip uptown to the Cloisters. By the time I make my next trip, I wonder what I’ll still recall of the information in the foregoing sentences. I’m not an aficionado of stained glass, but I have an abiding interest in Medieval art, so it’s not a waste of time for me to know a little something about this fragment. Nothing in the world, however, is going to make me want to know more about the pair of Syrian blown goblets from the Eleventh Century that, to my eyes, are the one thing that glass ought never to be: dirty-looking.  

Here’s a good one. Summer 2004: “The Flowering of the French Renaissance.” I open up to a handsome chalk drawing of a young man from the middle of the Sixteenth Century, attributed to the Clouet studio, who may be Guy de Laval XVII (who died at 26 in 1547) or Guy XVIII. It belonged to Catherine de’ Medici. “Skilled in diplomacy and in arranging marriages for her children, Catherine was eager to identify noble men and women throughout Europe.” Well, you could say that about her, I suppose, but it would sound better if she’d left a few grandchildren, and hadn’t acquired such a toxic reputation among Protestants. Not that I’m complaining! Page 23 of this bulletin features an image of one of my all-time favorite weird pictures, Moses and Aaron before Pharaoh: An Allegory of the Dinteville Family, by an unknown artist. It hangs, these days, over some furniture somewhere, but it used to be found in the galleries that you’d exit into after seeing a special exhibit in the Old Master Galleries (that’s what I call them). It’s bold and clear (as clear as a Lotto), and homoerotic in a way that manages to be both robust and coy. It’s very naughty, as befits a painting about a family scandal. On page 35, however, there’s a photograph of a set of deluxe pruning tools. More items that aren’t for sale. 

I don’t think that I’ve ever opened Summer 2009 before today. They don’t put the titles on the cover. You have to open them to find out what the subject is, if the cover art doesn’t tell you. The cover art here doesn’t tell you, and you probably wouldn’t figure it out, either — so I’ll let that go. The issue is devoted to “Scientific Research in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.” Now, it’s clear that we all ought to read this from cover to cover. I’m serious! You should see some of the equipment they’ve got there. Caption: “71. (left) Pendant (fig 65) being placed into the chamber of a scanning electron microscope (SEM) for surface analysis of enamels.” Is that contraption really sitting somewhere in the basement at 1000 Fifth Avenue? On page 41, a chart entitled Marker, showing a schematic Antibody brushing up against a schematic Antigen. This is from “Immunology and Art: Using Antibody-based Techniques to Identify Proteins and Gums in Binding Media and Adhesives.” I expect that a learned version of this paper has been published, eye-glazingly, elsewhere, but it’s stuff like this that keeps me in shape as a know-it-all. With just a few bits and pieces gummed and bound to my conversational palette, I can paralyze up five cocktail-party guests at close range. 

Ooh, Madame X. Here’s one I’m never going to throw away: Spring 2000, “John Singer Sargent in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.” An all-time beloved picture: Mr and Mrs I N Phelps Stokes. The thing to remember is that ‘P’ comes before ‘S.’ I’m just thinking out loud, here. If I were a real knickerbocker, I’d know that it’s “Phelps Stokes” and not “Stokes Phelps,” but every time I mention this picture I wonder if I’ve got it right, and hesitate so long that it sounds like I don’t know what I’m talking about. The Phelps Stokeses had houses on the same block of Madison Avenue as the Morgan house that’s now part of the Morgan Library; it may even have belonged to them at one point. I remember reading that somewhere. Also that Mrs Phelps Stokes, the wonderful Katharine-Hepburn-like American beauty in Sargent’s picture, died more or less broke in the Fifth Avenue apartment building built by her antiquarian husband. The Crash, you know. He’s in the picture, apparently, because he showed up at the studio instead of his wife’s wolfhound. Is that true? Almost. From page 28: “…. and the dog was unavailable — Stokes had ‘a sudden inspiration,’ he recalled, and ‘offered to assume the role of the Great Dane in the picture. Sargent was delighted, and accepted the proposal at once…'” You can’t make this stuff up. (Although evidently you can mangle the details.)

I don’t know what I’d do if I had to decide between the Sargent bulletin and Summer 1995, and could keep only one. Summer 1995 is devoted to the architectural history of — the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I have pored over every page with the enthusiasm of a fanatic child. Because what’s more interesting than almost any individual thing in the Museum is the building itself. I don’t mean beautiful; I mean interesting. To look at the aerial photograph of the Museum taken in 1920, before the lower reservoir was replaced by the Great Lawn, before the first bits of the American Wing were tacked on to the northwest corner, before — just what was tucked into that space before they built Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium (which was still new-ish when I first attended lectures there in the early Sixties)? — to look at this picture is to be confronted with a radically different Manhattan, a place familiar but incomplete, a town where they have no idea what’s coming. The most futuristic designers of Hollywood could never have imagined what would be added to this complex of structures in the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties. That’s because no one would have foreseen changes in the nature of the Museum itself. No one in 1920 could imagine the fun that my grandson would have running around the Engelhard Court — or the smiles on the guards’ faces. 

Let’s do this again some time! Maybe I’ll come across a bulletin that I can deaccession.

We’re having hot and humid weather again, and I’m finding it difficult to pay attention to anything. Well, there have been plenty of distractions — real distractions! For example! Did you see the picture of Queen Elizabeth outside 10 Downing Street yesterday? She was wearing a printed skirt with a solid top, and no hat. If proof was wanting that Rupert Murdoch’s End Times are upon us — upon him, I mean — surely that photograph closed the gap. It is very hard not to wish for terrible, terrible things to happen to Rupert Murdoch. For many of them, he’s responsible. For others, he’s not — few people can have been coerced into watching his television network or buying his newspapers — but then that’s why scapegoats were invented, and you have to admit that Rupert Murdoch looks like a scapegoat. In the words of Ko-Ko, I don’t think he’ll be missed.

Then there was the fire, which by the flukiest of flukes I saw with my own eyes. The building that houses Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun, built in 1872, was gutted by a roaring blaze last night. The fire started about five or ten minutes before I stepped out onto 86th Street, heading west to Madison to have dinner with Kathleen at Demarchelier. Because of my (painless) neck and back problems, my gaze is usually confined to the pavement when I walk, but something made me pause and look up. At first I thought that it was a violent thunderstorm sweeping up Central Park. Then I realized that this strange weather was not only much closer than the Park but smoke, not clouds. Because the wind was blowing west, I didn’t smell the fire until I was halfway between Third and Lex. (The synagogue stands a few doors in from Lex toward Park on the north side of 85th Street.) The crowd at 86th and Lex was almost impassable, and almost everyone seemed to be taking pictures with a cell phone. I couldn’t see any flames, but the smoke near the rooftops was illuminated by a hellish red glare. I happy to find that I could  cross Lex and continue on my way. (On our way home from dinner, Kathleen and I found the policemen pulling down white tape that would have obliged us to detour to the north — I was glad that I had lingered over dessert.) At Park, I walked into low-lying smoke and found it unpleasant for a moment or two to breathe.

When we got home from dinner, I was good for nothing but searching the Internet for news of the excitement. Pix (Channel 11) was first to post a story, then NY1, and, eventually, the Times. Not only had no one been injured (except for a few firefighters suffering minor injuries), but in view of its renovation the building had been stripped of all sacred objects, such as the Torah scroll. So, as Rabbi Hankel Lookstein said, it was only the building. This news made the excitement of passing a violent scene a lot less depressing and shameful than it might have been. And that’s when I spotted the picture of Her Majesty, for the first time in my experience not swathed from head to ankle in one color. How would I ever get to sleep?

Then, this morning, the sofa in the blue room came back from the upholsterer.  The sofa was built for my mother-in-law fifty-odd years ago, and we had it reupholstered when we came into possession in the mid-Eighties. If it hadn’t had a sentimental appeal for Kathleen, we might have deaccessioned it some time ago, because it is very wide for a sofa that seats only two people comfortably. (Three with drinks, if you know what I mean.) That’s not to say that I don’t like it; I do, very much. It’s a convincing replica of a Louis XVI piece, with beautifully distressed woodwork washed in pale blue. The upholstery from the Eighties had gotten very tired looking, but we had no plans to do anything about it until Will leaned over, shortly after he began to take steps, and took a bite out of the padding at the armrest. He couldn’t have done any damage if the fabric hadn’t been quite worn out, so Kathleen set to finding some new material. That was the cheap part; the fabric cost about 1/20th of the repholstery labor. But what beautiful work Jeff Alexander does!

Ray Soleil helped me carry the sofa upstairs, and later, after lunch, we drank a pot of tea while discussing the Greek debt problem and Ray’s conviction that the French really want to reinstate the monarchy. I can think of one Frenchman who doesn’t! I wrote to him just a little while ago, to tell him most of what I’ve just told to you, explaining that I therefore had nothing worth writing about here.  

Since the “collapse” of the prosecution’s case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the Times has published at least three editorializing complaints, written by columnists Joe Nocera, Jim Dwyer, and, most recently, Roger Cohen. The gist of all three pieces is that American justice rests on a principle of equality before the law. The possibility that a criminal might beat a rape rap by virtue of being a powerful and (hitherto) respected statesman is anathema to these writers, and one fears that they will bay to the moon until some sort of punishment is meted out. But their righteous indignation ought to be directed at more pressing targets.

We believe in equality before the law, but we also believe in something that needs to be discussed more frankly in our republic: equality of the law. While statute books bulge with draconian prohibitions that betray our history of wishful thinking on matters of the flesh — that there should even be such categories as “sex offense” and “drug offense” gives an idea of our disinclination to accept the contours of human nature — they are full of loopholes for other kinds of wrongs, the kind of wrong, say, perpetrated by James Johnson, the Washington operative with no business experience who was put in charge of the political patronage machine known as Fannie Mae. Mr Johnson’s activities have been anatomized in excoriating detail by Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner, in Reckless Endangerment. As almost every tut-tutting review of this angry history will tell you, Mr Johnson appears not to have broken any laws.

Reckless endangerment, as any law student can tell you, is a variety of the common law tort of negligence. But torts are civil, not criminal. I expect that reckless endangerment while driving a car is probably a criminal offense in a few jurisdictions, and that other bans on reckless endangerment are tied to contexts involving heavy or dangerous machinery. Reckless endangerment of the nation’s economy while administerting a semi-public financial corporation is not a crime. But it ought to be one, and not just because Mr Johnson’s misbehavior suggests the need for such a law. It always ought to have been the law. But we prefer to cloak the activities of corporate executives in moral neutrality. We strip them of their corporate status when they’re found to have indulged in crimes against property such as embezzlement and blackmail. Rather, turn that around: if embezzlement and blackmail are business as usual, then the malefactor keeps his corporate pass. Mr Johnson’s self-enrichment and political influence — what would you call them? — are therefore all right. Bernard Madoff goes to jail — but the array of bankers and fund managers who enabled his operation with their carelessness, deemed to have been “doing business,” are allowed to join the chorus of outrage.

Rape is an unconscionable abuse of power, and when a man combines the power of status with superior physical strength to overpower a sexual victim, his punishment out to be more severe than that of the ordinary Joe Schmoe. I hope that French voters will discover that Mr Strauss-Kahn is at best a recklessly imprudent man (assuming that the semen on the housekeeper’s dress was deposited there in the usual way) who perhaps ought not to be entrusted with great state powers. I don’t believe in jail time for criminals who are not mentally disturbed, but I would be happy to Dominique Strauss-Kahn brought to some kind of justice if indeed his encounter was not consensual. What I want no more of is sanctimonious whining at a newspaper that refuses to question the fundamental inequity of our corporation laws, which ironically, by granting corporations equal protection under the law, endow corporate executives with enormous powers to characterize what they do as normal and healthy while avoiding responsibility for financial and environmental damage.

The New York Times provides this country with a vital cleansing service, subjecting its operations to critical scrutiny. That mission is not best served by harping on sex scandals — not with a new band of robber barons abroad in the land. 

As I was tidying the bedroom on Sunday, I had second thoughts about putting a stack of books back on top of a dresser after I’d dusted it. Instead, I carried the pile to the laptop at the dining table, opened Readerware, and used the barcode scanner to autoload the books into the database. When that was done, I bulk edited the lot, assigning each book the same shelf location. Off the top of my head, I chose “Korean” to designate the location; the dresser in question is in the Korean style, or so we were told long ago. Now I have a handy printed list of the sixteen non-fiction titles that spend their time hidden by an array from framed family photographs, waiting for me to read them. At one point, they were all books that I was going to get to “next.” 

I continued to tidy my way around the bedroom, coming eventually to a pile of books that Kathleen plans to read. I brought this to the laptop computer as well, with “Kathleen’s Reading” as the location. Unlike the “Korean” batch, the books in “Kathleen’s Reading” were in no sense shelved; they were stacked in a pile. There are a number of such piles throughout the apartment, and by the end of the afternoon I had catalogued them all, even the multi-pile aggregation of 61 books located as “NonFiction.”

There were three distinct piles of books, “Chevet” (tucked into my nightstand), “Fiction Basket” (a dump in front of my nightstand), and “Fiction Annex,” a small pile in the blue room that didn’t fit anywhere else. The last pile to be catalogued ended up being called “Chair,” because I resolved to stack it in my reading chair whenever I wasn’t sitting there. This has already proved wearisome. It is a very tall stack. Thirteen books, plus a few extras. The extras are Rizzoli’s Treasures of Venice, and the Hallwag map of Venice, both of which are accompanying me through Judith Martin’s No Vulgar Hotel, an extremely amusing book about La Serenissima. No Vulgar Hotel by itself is not a thick book, but it makes a bundle with the guidebook and the map. Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Christianity is in the pile, of course, although I don’t think that it’ll be there much longer, as I am barrelling through the final quarter, my fondness of lingering over the great writing being trumped by the urge to shrink the pile, to which nothing will be added until there are only five books in the lot.

Another book that I hope to speed through is Jasper Becker’s book about Beijing, The City of Heavenly Tranquillity. There’s a Forbidden City guidebook to go with that, too, although I don’t need it anymore, as Becker has moved on to other parts of town. A third entry along these lines is Ina Caro’s delightful Paris to the Past, a sort of souvenir guide to day trips that someone staying in Paris might take to outlying sites of interest, such as Chartres and Malmaison. There’s Michael Ainger’s very good dual biography of Gilbert and Sullivan, and Giles Tremlett’s very something-else biography of Catherine of Aragon. Also Joseph Lelyveld’s book about Gandhi. A N Wilson’s new Dante in Love, which arrived the other day from the UK, went straight into “Chair.” The one book that Readerware’s autoload function detected as already in the database was a thick novel by George Sand that I retrieved from the storage unit last week, Consuelo. I don’t know if it’s any good — and that’s really the appeal. More than 900 pages! There are 105 chapters, plus a conclusion. I read the first one standing in the storage unit, and since I knew all the words I thought I might make a go of it. After all, it is set in Venice in the Eighteenth Century. I’m not sure that I’ll like Sand the novelist, but I already do like Sand the writer.

One book has already been knocked off the list: Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida. It may have been the slimmest book in the title, but it was also the least congenial. Although I can’t say that I found most of it incomprehensible, I did have a strong feeling of in-one-ear-and-out-the-other. It is a very death-haunted book — understandably, if you know the context. (Barthes’s beloved mother had just died, and he was sparked to write about photography in part by a photograph of her as a child in which he felt that he really made her out, the mother he had known as a girl in a winter garden.) I will be on the lookout for temptations to use the terms studium and punctum. 

At the top of the pile is John Ashbery’s new translation of Rimbaud’s Les Illuminations. I know this prose poem via Benjamin Britten’s (very selective) setting, so it took a moment to find the sung work’s signature line (J’ai seul la clef de cette parade), because it comes after two paragraphs of what Ashbery translates as “Sideshow.” Rimbaud makes Barthes read like a comic book. At the bottom of the pile is James Gleick’s The Information, which I read right up to the penultimate chapter months ago and then set aside, because I wanted to digest the book before I finished it. Even though I’ll finish it soon and find a good place for it in the bookcases, it ought to remain at the bottom of the pile, because it’s what got me to get back to managing my library. I want to own the information. God wot there’s a lot. 

The most exciting book in the pile, if also the most tiring, is the Ainger, which is really a triple biography of W S Gilbert, Arthur Sullivan — and Richard D’Oyly Carte, the impresario who harnessed the incompatible artists and provided a showcase for their collaboration at the Savoy Theatre. The details are dense, but they don’t obscure the personalities, although poor Helen Lenoir has faded into a translatlantic blur. All sorts of things that I didn’t know: Lewis Carroll approaching Sullivan about adapting Alice for the stage. (Hmmm….) Gilbert’s yachts. Sullivan wading in a creek at Yosemite. I always thought that Sullivan got his knighthood (in 1883) partly so that Victoria could shout “We are not amused” at Gilbert, but this is arrant nonsense, not least because it supposes that the Queen was paying attention to the Savoy operas. Sullivan was by nature an assiduous courtier, and numbered the Duke of Edinburgh among his good friends; one of the fruits of this connection was a Te Deum that Sullivan wrote to celebrate the Prince of Wales’s recovery from typhoid in 1872. That would have endeared him to Her Majesty, the dedicatee. 

As a reward for all my hard library work, I came down with a cough and a touch of sore throat on Saturday night, and spent the rest of the weekend in a listless state. Reading until I thought that I’d explode with information. 

In her engaging guide to Venice, No Vulgar Hotel, Judith Martin devotes a chapter to visiting the Serenissima with “Your Imaginary Friend.” This would be the poet or artist whose work has kindled your desire to visit Venice in the first place, or kept the flame burning brightly. Dante, Ruskin, Titian, Henry James, Byron — they’re all there and more. So is Donna Leon.

Fans of Donna Leon’s mysteries give themselves away by their abnormal interest in mundane places  — a counterintuitive desire to visit police headquarters or a sudden cry of “Look! That’s where Guido buys flowers for Paola!” For years, we responded to gracious luncheon invitations from friends who cautioned that they lived up ninety-four steps by cajoling them into coming to lunch with us instead. When they let drop that their apartment was used as the home for Miss Leon’s hero, we bounded up those ninety-four steps in a flash, brushed past our hosts and tore through the familiar setting.

Shown above (somewhere) is the Questura, or police headquarters, where Guido Brunetti cajoles Signorina Elettra Zorzi into helping him cope with the zombie careerist, Vice-Questore Patta (a Southerner, wouldn’t you know). I told you about Rome last week; yesterday, I discovered that Google Maps has given Venice the same treatment. Zoom in close, and the satellite pictures give way to breathtaking balloon views.  

It’s hot and humid today. Not miserably so, but enough to make me feel that summer is no time for working. After lunch with a friend in Turtle Bay, I walked up First Avenue to the storage unit, where I dropped off some winter shirts and picked up some summer shirts, along with a summer bedspread and a summer blanket. As if that weren’t enough to carry around — my next stop was Gracious Home, where I bought a Vornado fan — I tucked in George Sand’s Consuelo. I’d like to tell you something about this novel, but I am trying not to read the jacket descriptions and the introductory material, so all I can say is that Consuelo is very long. Having read the first chapter, I can also tell you that the heroine is a diligent Spanish girl with a beautiful voice who for some reason lives in Venice, possibly in the Eighteenth Century.

My friend at lunch planted the seed, when she asked me what my summer reading project was — would I re-read Proust? She meant that as a jest; it’s the all-purpose, perennial summer project that no one ever gets around to doing (except me; I’ve read In Search of Time Past three times, all during the summer). I thought about taking the Pléiade paperback of the entire cycle out to Fire Island in August, and maybe I’ll do that. I’ve not read Proust in French. But at the storage unit, there was Consuelo, equally fat but written, I expect, with a more circumscribed vocabulary. One is always running to the dictionary with Proust, unless one has the brains to have an English translation open to the same spot. How many times in your life have you looked up acajou, a word that bears absolutely no resemblance to mahogany? It’s all very well for Proust to use lots and lots of  different French words, which French people can presumably be expected to know; but it’s awfully hard on the rest of us, and I for one would like to see an edition in which every word that is used fewer than fifty times throughout the novel is translated in the margins. That’s precisely the sort of edition, by the way, that would be a snap to compile for an e-reader, in case anybody ambitious is listening. I have no recollection of a reason for ordering Consuelo from Amazon in Franch, and I really ought to finish François le champi, said to be Proust’s favorite novel as a boy, first. But let’s not get started on the Things That I Ought To Do Instead.

So I’m going to read now — read and tidy up. I made a frightful mess looking for a map of Venice earlier. A map-type map, that is, something that folds up and contains all the traditional information that Google Maps ignores in favor of restaurant locations. (The not-so-little church that I wanted to identify from the aerial image turned out to be Sant’Aponal, which dates from the early Eleventh Century. According to Rizzoli’s The Treasures of Venice, the interior is not open to the public. Imagine that!) The Venice map wasn’t with the other maps, which themselves are secreted in various spots at the moment (a transitional situation); the Venice map was tucked neatly alongside Paris From Above, in a bookshelf by my reading chair. But I didn’t think of that until I’d scattered maps all over the blue room. (The road map for Veneto-Friuli did not serve.) Plus, I’ve got to put the summer bedspread and blanket away for a few days (I’ll change the sheets on Friday), and plug in the new fan somewhere, and run downstairs to collect the mail and pick up something for dinner.   

And I’ve got to find where Guido buys flowers for Paola.

The other day, I bought an iPod. Now he’s lost it, you’re thinking; how many times has he bored us silly with his Nano Notes? But this time, it isn’t a Nano, but a Classic iPod, or iPod Classic. It looks like a Nano that ate one of those cookies in Alice in Wonderland. It is quite ridiculously large. But with the storage to match (about ten times the capacity of a Nano), it is the perfect place for my opera collection, or as much of it as will fit. Every day, I load another five operas onto the thing. I still can’t listen to opera if the page that I’m writing requires actual thought, but as you can see there’s nothing here that Un Ballo in Maschera (Bergonzi, Nilsson, Molinari-Pradelli) would get in the way of. 

It’s Thursday, which means that I’m planning to go downtown in a few hours to sit with Will while his parents have dinner alone somewhere. Tonight, I am going to take a bunch of the shirt cardboards that I’ve been hoarding. There was a time when shirt cardboards were the joy of my youth, and I got in a lot of trouble once for advancing myself the cardboards from my father’s shirts drawer. For a while, I was very into constructing hybrid castle/stage sets. I was very into hidden doors and secret passageways, and even though these were not easily realized in shirt cardboard (which at least had the merit of being stone grey), it was exciting to create three dimensional models of the houses of horror that I hoped to live in some day. I have no memory of outgrowing this pastime, so maybe I didn’t. Maybe it’s going to blossom again in the guise of “playing with Will.” 

Being with Will is always quite straightforward — we do this, we do that — but remembering my time with him is quite strange; it’s as though I were reviewing my recollections through someone else’s prescription glasses. It is impossible, when he is not actually in the room, to think of him as a child of nearly eighteen months. There are too many precocities, or at any rate moments when I feel that I’m with a teenager, or a third-grader. There are shards of his personality, as it were, that are already fully grown. They’re surrounded by undeveloped parts, sort of like a Roman Forum but under construction, not in ruins. Most of what he says is still — unintelligible, and it’s not always clear that he knows what talking is for. (Or, rather, what it isn’t.) But he appears to understand a great deal of grown-up talk. Like his mother, he has a formidable memory, and just because he hasn’t been exposed to something in a while doesn’t mean that the unguarded mention of it won’t kindle an insistent interest. (When in doubt, I spell things out.) 

He’s also “musical” — he dances, bangs drums, and even riffs on the harmonica. There is a spectrum of his vocalizing that could be called singing, sort of. But we are a long way from Aida. There has been no listening to music at our house. When he and his parents come to dinner, there might be a jazz playlist purring away somewhere, but not loud enough to catch Will’s notice. And when he’s here with Kathleen and me, we somehow don’t think to play anything — except, of course, for Shaun the Sheep. There’s step dancing in Shaun, which Will gamely attempts to imitate. It is mostly a matter of shaking his butt. If there’s one thing I’m looking forward to, it’s taking him to see Paul Taylor. There are always lots of kiddies in that audience. But although it’s very easy to imagine Will sitting rapt through a twenty-minute dance, it’s also easy to imagine that he might respond in a manner more typical of his age. Pretty soon, I expect, I’ll be learning all the minimum ages. At the Museum, happily, there isn’t one, but you have to be ten to get into the Frick. If he keeps growing at his current rate, Will will pass for ten when he’s eight.

But I mustn’t push things. I must remember what happened when a friend of ours was taken, as her first opera ever, to Parsifal. Amazingly, her date’s passion for this masterpiece proved not to be contagious in the least!

David Eagleman’s Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain isn’t a disappointment, exactly — which is to say that it is a disappointment, in being rather less amusing to read that I expected it to be. I have the awful feeling that I’m reading a book that is aimed at guys. Worse, it might even be written by one. Eagleman’s tone is that of the sharp guy who gets a kick out of showing you that your intuitions and unexamined assumptions are way off base. The prevailing imagery is drawn from business and sports. There’s a sense of wonder at all the trouble that the brain takes to make our lives simple and efficient — to make it possible for us to pay minimal attention. 

In other words, it’s a very different book from Kathryn Schulz’s Being Wrong. Schulz approaches the brain as an error-prone organ whose bad habits we have to bear more or less constantly in mind as we navigate the complexities of social life, correcting for bias and prejudice even when — especially when — we think that we’re free of them. Eagleman thinks that the brain is cool. “Sometimes it is tempting to think that seeing is easy despite the complicated neural machinery that underlies it,” runs a characteristic observation. “To the contrary, it is easy because of the complicated neural machinery.” Thinking and consciousness are not necessarily good things, especially when the brain can perform difficult tasks on autopilot. 

The handwriting on the wall appears early, on page 6. 

Consider the activity that characterizes a nation at any moment. Factories churn, telecommunications lines buzz with activity, businesses ship products. People eat constantly. Sewer lines direct waste. All across the great stretches of the land, police chase criminals,. Handshakes secure deals. Lovers rendezvous. Secretaries field calls, teachers profess, athletes compete, doctors operate, and bus drivers navigate. You may wish to know what’s happening at any moment in your great nation, but you can’t possibly take in all the information at once. Nor would it be useful, even if you could. You want a summary. So you pick up a newspaper — not a dense paper like the New York Times but lighter fare such as USA Today. You won’t be surprised that none of the details of the activity are listened in the paper; after all, you want to know the bottom line. You want to know that Congress just signed a new tax law that affects your family, but the detailed origin of the idea — involving lawyers and corporations and filibusters — isn’t especially important to that new bottom line. And you certainly wouldn’t want to know all the details of the food supply of the nation — how the cows are eating and how many are being eaten — you only want to be alerted if there’s a spike of mad cow disease. You don’t care how the garbage is produced and packed away; you only care if it’s going to end up in your backyard. You don’t care about the wiring and infrastructure of the factories, you only care if the workers are going on strike. That’s what you get from reading the newspaper.

Your conscious mind is that newspaper. 

This imaginary “you” whom Eagleman is addressing, this solipsistic USA Today glancer, is precisely the sort of person whom one would have expected a front-liner in the cognitive revolution to disdain. Instead, Eagleman adopts the fawning peppiness of a car dealer. What does this “you” want to do with all the free time that simplistic summaries open up? From what I can tell, all “you” wants to do is to play Tetris. 

I understand that the importance of Incognito is not its presentation of the psychology experiments and fMRI analyses that have become almost familiar in recent years, thanks to books like Being Wrong — indeed, Eagleman writes for readers who haven’t been following this issue (who haven’t, for example, been reading Malcolm Gladwell) — but rather its insistence that we need to reconsiders our ideas of conventional and legal responsibility. If Charles Whitman, the Texas Tower shooter, had survived his orgy of death, and if it had been possible to detect the tumor that was compressing his amygdala, would it have been correct to hold him criminally liable for his acts? How do we manage the problems that ensue when otherwise effective medication sparks the irrepressible urge to gamble in Parkinson’s victims? What is the culpability of drug addiction? These are all important questions, and working out practical answers — refashioning our criminal legal system in the process — is going to be a tough slog. What I’ve seen of Eagleman’s thinking on these points seems thoughtful and grounded, and I’m looking forward to seeing more. But I’m disappointed to see Eagleman giving a pass to vernacular masculine inattentiveness. 

At one point, Eagleman refers to what I’ve come to call the paradox of the centipede: the centipede managed its hundred feet just fine until it was asked how it managed, whereupon it was paralysed by second-guessing. If you think “too much,” you can screw up your golf swing or your sex life, and you can become awfully familiar with insomnia. But I don’t think that thinking is the problem. Thinking is the symptom. Centipedes, we may trust, never actually stop to consider their articulatory powers, but when we do, it’s usually a sign that they’re not working. When we toss in bed, it’s a sign that our wiring is faulty; whatever the cure might be (medication, life-style modification), it is consciousness that alerts us to the dysfunction. It’s too bad that more of our fallible parts don’t do the same. 

And it’s too bad, I suppose, that David Eagleman comes from Texas, and not the Northeast Corridor.

What I’d very much like to know is how many New Yorkers bought tickets to one of the Royal Danish Ballet’s six performances here this week because Jennifer Homans’s chapter about August Bournonville, in her magisterial but deliciously readable history of ballet, Apollo’s Angels, inspired them to do so. It can’t have been just me.

Kathleen liked the evening’s offerings very much, although when she told me that the company’s disciplined attention to detail reminded her of the title character in Coppélia (a mechanical doll), I had to quibble. I saw some of the most fluid, “natural” dancing ever. It was as though the members of the RDB spend their lives offstage as well as on- leaping effortlesly into the ether and floating across the room on point.

What’s specatacular about the Royal Danish Ballet is the complete absence of the spectacular. The dancing is very fine, and often intoxicating, but it is never showy. The reason why I think there were other Homans readers in the audience is that it would otherwise be suspicious for New Yorkers so vociferously to applaud understatement. This was a crowd that had a lot more in common with chamber music aficionados than with the opera crowd.

We saw La Sylphide, which I must confess to having confused, inattentively, with Les Sylphides (until Jennifer Homans straightened me out), and Act III of Napoli. or, as it is called in the program, Napoli, Act III. I suppose that the RDB must mount complete performances of August Bournonville’s Napoli ever now and then, out of professional courtesy, but most serious balletomanes will go to their graves without seeing more of this work than its final act, which, like the end of Nutcracker and Act IV of The Sleeping Beauty, is a chain of “characteristic dances” and showpieces without any narrative content. Back in my radio days, when I was first learning about ballet (a subject that I knew absolutely nothing about until I was twenty-three), Napoli, Act III was the cheesiest ballet in the repertoire, just on the basis of its title. First, Naples. Naples as imagined by a Danish ballet master. Stop right there. Second, the truncation — the third act performed “out of context.” That was then. Tonight, I sat through the first half of NA3 with slightly detached interest; the characteristic dances didn’t strike me as characteristic of much more than the Bournonville style. But then somebody clapped a tambourine, and the tarantella got going. What an orgy! I realize that that is not the best word to describe an ensemble that even at its most energetic never stumbled into incoherence. But most energetic is exactly what it was, a pile-up of couplings that amounted, almost, to one too many birthday presents. And then there was the finale!

La Sylphide is the first in a line of more sophisticated ballets, notably Giselle but also including, cousin-German-wise, Swan Lake; and it’s easy to reduce its mild, pantomimed melodrama to “precursor” status. But what I remember about it isn’t elementary, because the principals, Caroline Cavallo and Mads Blangstrup, were great actors as well as gifted dancers. Great actors can sell just about anything, and that’s why Mr Blangstrup’s Scottish bridegroom and Ms Cavallo’s elfin temptress blasted a niche in my memory whereby I will recall this evening. Being gifted dancers, they were able to act with their bodies, without speech. They showed me how an art form that imposes silence on its practitioners can be as eloquent as a Shakespearean monologue 

About a thousand years ago, I had the bright idea of pulling a wool ragg sock from LL Bean over a Rubbermaid quart drinking bottle, thinking (rightly) that it would do good enough a job of absorbing condensation — I fill my water bottle with plenty of ice — to allow me to stash it in tote bags alongside books and other things that oughtn’t to get wet. I soon discovered, to my great delight, that the sock was an extraordinarily effective insulator. The water bottle chuggles with ice cubes hours after they’d have melted otherwise. I can’t tell you how much I wish that the socks were available in more appealing colors, and I regret that drinking from a sock — an athletic sort of sock at that — is going to trigger a lot of gag reflexes. But, boy, does it work.

I tell you all of that to explain what Will is holding in these pictures. That he is holding it ia nor surprising, I suppose, although I feel slightly immodest in saying so. He wants the grown-up water bottle. (He wants the grown-up everything. His joustings with the three-gallon watering can out on the balcony are absolutely heroic.)  He can barely hold it when it’s full, and even when it’s not, he likes to grip it by the top fold, which runs along the seam between the sock part and the ankle part. Inevitably, the sippy straw disappears in the wool, and Will hands me my water bottle for repairs.

Over pizza — when I’m not up to catering as well as babysitting, we order a fantastic sausage pizza from Lil’ Frankie’s; I’d give anything to have one up here in Yorkville — I was treated to all sorts of conspiratorial winks, nods, and leers. Of course it was nothing of the kind, but that’s what it seemed like. Not boys’ night out, exactly, but close. There was one squinting grin that seemed to say, “We are two cool cats, man.” For all I know, Will could have been imitating someone he saw making this expression sincerely. He is a quick study. The alternative explanation is that we ought to be worried that he hit his head twice today, once by running into a pole at school and then by later pulling down a small curtain rod.   

Later, it was clear that Shaun the Sheep’s adventures have become very familiar to Will. This was good, because I had no trouble getting him to go into his bedroom to play with things and to read books — for a little while at a time. Whenever he got wound up, we’d troop back to the living room for another favorite episode. I find that I’m developing protective feelings for the hapless sheep farmer, even if he is a jerk.

I was a little tired, what with the remnant of a cold and the wake of the infusion, which is always a bit exhausting, if only for a day; so I was really, really grateful for the taxis that appeared right away, on 86th Street heading downtown and Avenue C heading home. I don’t think that I’d have been able to write this if they hadn’t. 

Now, of course, I feel very silly. It turns out that common colds don’t make Remicade infusions unsafe. Every kind of fever and infection does, but not colds. So there was nothing to worry about all along. I was misinformed by an overzealous nurse; the rheumatologist set me straight. It turned out, though, that the Infusion Therapy Unit had me down for an infusion tomorrow. Coming back would have been a bore, but not a very great one; in the event, I didn’t have to — there was a vacancy. So I had the infusion after all and am determined to be Superman by Saturday at the latest.

We had Manhattan Theatre Club Tickets for this evening. We neither of us wanted to go, but we thought we’d better, so we did. (We couldn’t postpone, because the run of the show ends on Sunday.) We didn’t know anything at all about Daniel Goldfarb’s Cradle and All, but it turned out to be an almost perfect theatre piece (but for some journeyman longueurs in the second act). Maria Dizzia and Greg Keller played two couples, one per act, living in adjacent Brooklyn Heights apartments. One couple can’t agree about having a baby; the other’s has kept its parents from getting a good night’s rest for eleven months. The trials endured by the parents when they follow “expert” advice for getting their daughter to sleep on her own were bizarrely, electrically familiar. I had to wonder, though, who, aside from grandparents like me, Mr Goldfarb had in mind as his audience, because if there is one truth that’s not sufficiently universally acknowledged, it’s that new parents don’t go to the theatre.

And I really do believe that it would have killed my daughter and son-in-law to sit through — not a re-enactment, exactly, but, worse, an alternative hell. In other words, things could be different but just as bad. Neither of the parents appeared to be working, for one thing, and still… When, toward the end, the dad pours a glass of wine for himself and one for his wife, and she asks why they didn’t think to do this “five hours ago,” he blithely answers, “We’re Jews.” It brought the house down — that’s the sort of line that’s practically an old family joke for MTC subscribers, even the goyim. At one point, the mom finds a Sophie behind the sofa cushions and explodes with rapture: she has been looking for Sophie for weeks! A few minutes later, the dad has good reason to want the Sophie out of the way, so he tosses her right across the room, and, let me tell you, it is a shocking sight. If you don’t know what kind of an animal Sophie is, or why she’s so popular with today’s little ones, you’re just not cool (but I won’t tell). Which reminds me of the time that Megan mocked me for subscribing to Time Out New York: “You just want people to think you’re young.” Now she would be accusing me of making her produce a grandchild just so that I could catch all the allusions in a smart off-Broadway play.

In case I don’t get round to writing up Cradle and All properly, let me say that the two actors were great. Ms Dizzia is very beautiful, even when she’s not, and Mr Keller reminded me more than once of that whole-deck-of-cards-up-my-sleeve virtuosity of Mark Rylance.

What’s worst about the cold that I’m battling at the moment is the likelihood that it will force a postponement of the Remicade infusion that has been scheduled for tomorrow, Wednesday afternoon. What’s almost as bad is suffering the indignities of a bad cold — sniffling, sneezing, hacking and hawking — alongside the miseries, great and small, that Remicade suppresses. The last dose has been exhausted in the fight against my over-active autoimmune system, and I’m once again under imflammatory attack.

I’m scribbling this note in the morning, because I not only the energy but the will do so. This afternoon, if yesterday’s experience is anything to go by, I shall slip into a black funk of purposelessness that will feel a lot like despair. The only treatment is reading, which at a time like this really does make me forget myself (between sneezes). I’m in the middle of two good books, Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Christianity and Angus Wilson’s Anglo-Saxon Attitudes. In the first, I’ve just finished with medieval Christianity in the West, and will now turn to the East, for about a hundred pages of Byzantium and Russia. I shall try to get through that today. As to the novel, it’s perfect reading for the pickle I’m in, because everybody is at least mildly discontented, and at least one character — I’m thinking of Ingeborg Middleton and her demented and disappointing Christmas carol party — strikes me as borderline psychotic in a Tennessee Williams way, although, refreshingly, not from the South. What could be more miserable than England in 1954? (I’m not asking.)

Knowing how wretched I was, Kathleen was resolved to play Sheherazade last night, or our version of that fable, which consists of provoking me into rambling on about one of my hobby-horses. She had no idea, however, of how to begin. I was bearishly clamped and cross. But a glass of wine (and some Advil) warmed me up a bit, and I started talking, without any prompts, about things that I’d read in MacCulloch, familiar things for the most part that he reminded me of. For example, “the rediscovery in Italy around 1070 of two copies of a compilation of imperial law,” which triggered the launch of the first university, at Bologna, and the formalization of the fine art of medieval forgery (which MacCulloch glancingly mentions), according to which it was perfectly all right to “reproduce” lost or missing charters.

We can call them forgeries, but our attitudes to such matters are conditioned by the humanist historical scholarship which emerged in Italy in the fifteenth century. That leads us to expect that our history must be based on carefully checked and authenticated evidence, or it simply cannot exist. For centuries before, though, people lived in societies which did not have enough documents to prove what they passionately believed to be true: the only solution was to create the missing documentation.

I don’t know how Kathleen sits through these ruminations, but she keeps me going with questions, and she claims that she enjoys learning what I have to say. Perhaps she just likes the sound of my voice. In any case, I’m not so miserable after all.

Over the past few weeks, the mother of a friend of mine has been dying. I am in no way a friend of the family, so I knew nothing about her illness beyond what my friend told me, and, as I wasn’t a friend of the family, and we are both reserved to the point of being French about eschewing personal disclosures that might seem offhand, he did not tell me very much. When he mentioned hospice care, and the need to keep his mother comfortable, I knew that death was at hand, but it was not in the nature of our friendship for me to expect a trumpeted announcement that it had arrived. I felt sad for my friend for all the usual reasons but also for a few quirky ones. (His mother was my father’s age when he died, twenty-six years ago; from which another special reason might be deduced: she was twice as close to me in age as he is. My friend is only a few years older than my daughter, and I worry a lot about dying before my grandson, who pretty clearly loves me as deeply as a child his age can, is old enough to remember me.) The illness had come on suddenly, one of those factors that is a blessing or a curse depending on your perspective at the moment. I hoped, as I think we all do, that when it came to my friend’s telling me that his mother had died, I wouldn’t say anything fatuous or otherwise unwelcome.

Being me, however, I would certainly want to say something, and that is how Facebook presented a problem. My friend mentioned the hospice care to me, as I’m sure he did to other friends, but he said nothing about it at Facebook. He said very little at Facebook, counting, I believe, on his friends’ intelligence and empathy to infer the absolutely necessary information, which he had also stated, in one sentence (saying that his mother was very ill), on his Web log. I want to make two points here. The first is that my friend’s Facebook page was, laudably, a place of implication, at which friendship was honored by the absence of bogus intimacy (chitchat, gossip, and drama). I find that I cannot get round the word “noble” when thinking of it. The other day, for example, he posted an album of photographs that he has taken while attending to his parents out of town. He is a talented photographer, and his pictures were, under the circumstances, eloquent without being garrulous. It was done, if I may say so, as Elizabeth Bennet would have done it, not as Mrs Bennet would have done.

The other point is that I tied myself to the mast when reading the comments of Facebook friends who were friends of the family. One friend commented on the photo album by saying that she was so sorry to hear what her own mother had just told her. (Ah, so it has happened, I said to myself. Then I said to myself, told her what?) Another friend appears to have committed the faux pas that I was determined to avoid, regretting my friend’s loss before it actually occurred. Once upon a time, that’s exactly what I’d have done; I’d have been unable to resist the occasion for expressing my condolences, because, frankly, I couldn’t help displaying the possession of knowledge. I don’t care for the cruder forms of power, but I have a passion for the latest information. I don’t so much want to know things before other people do as I want to know them at the very first instant when I might reasonably be expected to know them. Every now and then, this leads me to bank on an inference, and in the past my banking has been more than occasionally imprudent. Now that my natural impetuousness is fading with age, I’m better equipped to resist such temptations.

This morning, the announcement came, at Facebook; my friend’s friends were linked to a handsome Web site that included an obituary published in the local city newspaper. My relief at not having made a fool of myself was, under the circumstances, arguably unseemly, but nobody saw it and I mention it now for the edification of others: since I believe that we ought to risk a little more than we do making fools of ourselves, I have to prize the moments when foolishness is averted, because it is not as a matter of policy. (Let no one imagine that tying yourself to the mast as Odysseus did is a policy.) My friend wrote to me, briefly, and in his email he mentioned a piece of music that he has been listening to. It was something that I knew only a famous excerpt of, but whether from freakishness or synchronicity, a CD of the work sat atop a very small pile of dics within reach of my workspace. So I listened to it, all of it, and I allowed myself the largely but not wholly ignorant speculation that my friend’s mother would have smiled to know that I finally did. 

Among the writers presentging their foundation  mythologies — how they became readers and writers — in the Summer Fiction issue of The New Yorker is Jennifer Egan. Egan offers up her brief career in “Archeology“; having realized that she was too squeamish for the pulse and flow of medicine, she was attracted by the dead humans of paleontology. Visions of foreign travel and exotic climes were splintered by the blinding heat of a field in Illinois. Her experience with a square meter of Native American remains started badly but improved, and when it improved to the point where Egan had learned what she needed to learn from it, she went back to San Francisco and saved up for a sojourn of non-invasive contact with living Europeans. “But my sojourn in Kampsville has stayed with me—the sensation I had of scraping away the layers between myself and a lost world, in search of its occupants.”

And I thought, is that it? I am still trying to put my hands on the qualities that make Egan’s fiction special. The best that I can do is to say that she captures in her prose — which is to say that she does more than merely describe — the temptations of the glamorously dodgy. Her characters are almost always doing something wrong, but it is rarely something very wrong: a matter of misdemeanors, not felonies. In A Visit from the Good Squad, Sasha not only steals things — little things, like cheap binoculars and pens and a child’s scarf — but she sets them out, as trophies, in her flat. Somehow the display seems as wrong as the kleptomania, and possibly worse. But it’s easy to miss what Egan’s characters avoid (for the simple reason that Egan is a mistress at leading the dance of fiction): the vicious and the disgusting. Their sins are sins of weakness, of giving in to the glittering trinket. And yet Egan invests these sins with all the desperate loss of Eve’s biting into the Apple, and then offering it to Adam. The first sin didn’t much look like one.

If it takes me a while to figure Egan out, I won’t mind. I’ve known her work for little more than a year (in which I’ve read everything, some of it twice), and that’s not very long for taking the measure of subtlety. It occurs to me that Egan belongs to the small company of great women writers because, unlike notable male novelists, she doesn’t trumpet her emotions or swish her toe in the nostalgia of lost youth; while, unlike the run of women writers, she takes an ironic (displaced) view not only of her characters but of the very art of fiction as well. (I maintain that the PowerPoint chapter of Goon Squad is a triumph of imaginative literature, and perhaps the degree zero of graphic fiction.) And while Egan assuredly wants to be read, I doubt that she wants to be grasped. (Men always do, and complain that they never are — why is that?) Much as I’d like to roll out a critical reading of Jennifer Egan that sparkles with insight, I’m going to distinguish between wanting to do it and wanting to have done it. I’m not going to let the latter impulse (which is of course the stronger) hurry me.

What a prolix old fool I am: this was meant to be an apology for not having finished John Armstrong’s In Search of Civilization, a book that makes a number of highly sympathetic arguments about the linkage between virtue and prosperity (linkages, I say, not causalities). I completely share his horror of populism and its works; I also share his interest in popularization, which is the art of taking the trouble to strip away the non-essential accretions of sophistication from things that are beautiful and true. At one point, in connection with Abbé Suger of all people, Armstrong insists on the importance of charm. Can you think of a quality more deplored by modernism? Today’s cognitive revolution is demonstrating the many ways in which warmth and sympathy are vital to human fulfillment, and how deeply even the chilliest of us crave them, but our artists are taking their time about getting the message.

Realizing that I wasn’t going to be able to say anything solid about Armstrong’s book, I broke off at a keenly interesting place and went downstairs to collect the mail. Along the way, I read another foundation story, Salvatore Scibona’s “Where I learned to read.” The question has two answers. The first really answers a slightly different question: Where I learned that I wanted to learn how to read. That took place in an old shack outside his working-class home. The answer to the title question is “St John’s College at Taos.” Regular readers will know that nothing makes me happier than hearing about young people buckling down with the great books and loving it. “All things considered, every year since has been a more intense and enigmatic joy.” Exactly. 

When I saw in the paper today that Andrew Gold died, I couldn’t really place him. His song, “Thank You For Being A Friend,” came back, dimly, but not in any particular voice. It wasn’t until I saw the album cover for All This And Heaven Too at Joe.My.God that the full blast of the late-Seventies sensation came back to me. Lord, how I loved that album! Or did I? Only two song titles are familiar; the other one is Never Let Her Slip Away, which I loved to pieces. To pieces! And yet it had slipped completely out of my mind; I didn’t even miss it! (If something had ever brought a fragment of it to mind, I’d have scoured the work of Harry Nilsson or Lowell George or Rupert Holmes in search of it.) I just listened to it now, thanks to iTunes, where I bought it as well, and soon it will be on the Nano that I take on errands. This wonderful modern world! This crazy modern world, I mean, where you can live for thirty-three years without thinking of a song, where there are such songs (to be loved to pieces and absolutely forgotten), and then, hey presto, the singer dies and everyone hauls out his stuff. Last time I looked, the import pressing of the All This And Heaven Too was priced at Amazon somewhere in the neighborhood of $175. I remember when that sort of thing used to happen to LPs. Which is why I’m the sort of person who would consider, however briefly, paying nearly two hundred dollars for a compact disc: I need hard copy.

It’s warm again, but it’s still fairly dry. I’ve just come in from a round of errands. I wasn’t in the mood for errands, but on Saturday I ordered a veal tenderloin at Eli’s. They don’t — surprise surprise — carry the cut as a matter of course. It was just dumb luck that wafted me into the store two weeks ago on the very day that, for some reason, they were stocking it. I was terrified to think of the cost of an entire tenderloin, but that’s what I had to order. Turns out to be about a pound, just enough for four. At less than $10 a slice, that’s not so very bad. The only question is, what am I going to do with it? When I ordered it, I wasn’t thinking. Or rather, I was thinking about ordering a veal tenderloin in the abstract. I wanted to declare my interest in the ordering of veal tenderloin in a way that the butcher at Eli’s would best appreciate. Sadly, however, I have no use for veal tenderloin today. The meat went straight into the freezer, because Kathleen talked me out of putting an impromptu dinner party together over the weekend. It’s going to be hot, and I’m going to be tired. I’m in that ten-day trough before a Remicade infusion that I wrote about in March.  Which also explains my ordered the veal tenderloin. The grey cells are not firing on all cylinders. 

I want to save what zip and vim I’ve got this weekend for Will. Will was in Washington last weekend; his father was best man in a wedding. He himself wore a tux, like his dad and the other men in the wedding party; and, like them, he wore black Converse high-tops with his black tie. He wasn’t actually wearing a tie, but my hunch is that any Manhattan-born kid who grows up in Alphabet City and wears his first tuxedo before he’s eighteen months old will probably grow up to be even more sophisticated than Woody Allen. Even if he does retain an attachment to Shaun the Sheep. Megan stumbled on the Shaun the Sheep series at Netflix by happy accident. And I do mean “happy,” because this stop-motion animation by the makers of Wallace and Gromit is superbly watchable, and before you accuse me of losing my self-respect I’ll tell you why: there is no dialogue as such. There is a great deal of baa-ing and barking and moaning and groaning, and it is always perfectly clear what is happening, and what is about to happen. But you have to watch, because there are no dialogue cues. No corny jokes, no tedious talking down to kidlets. I expect that Shaun the Sheep was made in this way because the filmmakers tapped German financing, but it’s a model that ought to be widely followed in children’s entertainment. (There’s only so much of Adam Sandler singing “Fare-wElmo!” that I can take.) The episode in which Shaun engineeers a pizza-buying expedition is delightful, by the way, and, as for Will, he already knows that the part where the three pigs try to scare the sheep is going to scare him, and he wants to be held.

Reading James Surowiecki’s column in The New Yorker just now (“The Warrren Court“), it occurred to me that we must be more careful about using the word “competition.” I haven’t researched the matter, but I believe that the word is of greatest use in the commercial world, where it describes behavior designed to attract voluntary transactions with opposite parties who have several merchants or bankers or service providers to choose from. As such, any connection with the violence of plunder is unfortunate. It’s probably best to avoid talking of “competition for resources” among plants and animals, who are not known to intend any such thing. (Some sexual rivalries are competitive, but those ending in the death or dismemberment of a contender are not.) It is also unwise to speak of competition in connection with banking. Bankers are the most natural monopolists in the world, and as the history of banking in New York City alone will attest, they swallow each other up with gusto — eliminating competition. Bankers are not interested in providing “the best service” or “the best interest rates” or the best of anything. They’re interested only in having the most “assets” — other people’s money on deposit (and technically the bankers’ liabilities). Bankers, like doctors and lawyers, are not, as a rule, good businessmen, as is attested by the numbers of gifted lawyers, doctors and bankers who have become successful businessmen by moving outside the confines of professional frameworks. In any case, Mr Surowiecki’s argument that the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau will be good for banks because it will improve competition is certain to fall on very deaf ears.

A spell of fine, dry weather has set me to a thousand household chores that were unthinkable during the dark, dank spring that preceded the blisteringly sultry spring that made the even more unthinkable. Ray Soleil came by this morning, to help out with one or two things (such as hanging the three photographs from Christian Chaize’s Praia Piquinia series that I picked up at Jen Bekman’s 20×200 Project). After lunch and a bit of shopping — when we walked into Crawford Doyle, Dot McCleary was holding up the Times obituary of Hans Keilson, which prompted me to buy a copy of The Death of the Adversary — we came back to the flat, and I decided to rearrange my closets. Although strange in many ways, I am quite normal about closets, and habitually throw things into them for as long as I can get away with it. About two months after I stop getting away with it, I do something. Reorganizing the closets this afternoon turned out to be farily straightforward, and it was done in the short time that it took Ray to watch Blame It On the Bellboy, Mark Herman’s glorious 1992 farce. What I’ve still got to deal with is the clutch of shopping bags that had, over time, been thrown into the closet for lack of a better hiding place. One of the bags, naturally, is stuffed with neatly folded shopping bags. It is not the only one in the house, I’m afraid. What do you think would happen if I threw it away?

***

Thanks for the encouragement and  inspiration! I threw away another bag in its place. The bag of bags that emerged from the closet was packed with really big bags, from Venture Stationery, Eli’s, and Gracious Home. But if I couldn’t quite do without them, I resolved to get rid of the bag of bags in the hall closet, the one that’s full of the cheap paper bags in which the laundry returns my “boxed” shirts, as well as a large accumulation of plastic shopping bags from Agata & Valentina. Agata & Valentina used to dispense a stout paper shopping bag that was perfect for storing just about anything, from a stack of books to a half-dozen short-sleeved summer shirts to an entire collection of Silpat bakeware. But, at just about the time when these bags were discontinued, I became incapable of overlooking the downside of storing things in shopping bags, so I don’t miss them. I’ve also gotten rid of a lot of the stuff that I was storing in shopping bags. Getting rid of the bag of bags just now was yet another breakthrough in my resistance to the permanent attachment of everything that comes through the front door and doesn’t rot.

***

In addition to The Death of the Adversary, I bought two other books, a first edition of Edith Sitwell’s English Eccentrics that beckoned alluringly from the shopwindow (Edith Sitwell is the most gloriously perfectly genuine old fraud that ever was) and something that I hadn’t heard of, John Armstrong’s In Search of Civilization: Reclaiming a Tarnished Idea. I’ve been getting better at resisting the appeal of books that “look interesting” (meaning that I didn’t know they existed five minutes before), but I’m pretty sure that Armstrong’s book is not going to make it into the Guilt Pile. It’s not very long (195 pages) and the objective stated in its subtitle could not be more arresting. Even if I disagree with Armstrong’s ideas, I’ll get plenty out of the book — and the prospect of serious disagreement is very doubtful, if my random glance at the discussion of the Japanese tea ceremony can be generalized. “The lesson of the tea ceremony is not that we should copy it exactly. The lesson is that we can take fairly minor ordinary activities and raise them to a higher meaning.” Good heavens, this was written for me!

When I paid for the books, I told Dot that I didn’t need a bag. I’ve already got dozens, folded neatly in a shopping bag.

From one of the dankest springs that anyone can recall, we have been hurled into midsummer sultriness. It’s surprisingly incapacitating. I had big plans for today, and followed through on precisely none of them. Here’s how bad it was: I read feeds, faute de mieux. Feeds! On a holiday!

This morning, I persuaded Kathleen to get out of bed on the earlyish side, so that we could see the 10:30 showing of Midnight in Paris. There were still plenty of aisle seats when we walked in, especially in the back, where I prefer to sit (so that I don’t block people, but also so that I can dart out unobtrusively when the first gallon of Coke hits my bladder), but there was a good crowd for that time of day. Kathleen loved it, as I knew she would. I saw a lot of details that had flown by on Friday — for example, the party atmosphere in the old Peugeot that picks up Gil on his first trip back to the Twenties babbled and swayed in much the same way as the rooftop crowd of night-clubbers at the end of Radio Days. I don’t think that the similarity is at all referential; rather, Woody Allen has an Idea of “hobnobbing with the rich” that animates both scenes. And another thing: I’ve been increasingly aware of how the filmmaker sees himself as a magician, and how his movies become most amusing when you let him show you something unexpected, such as the presence of Edgar Degas. He is even better with old tricks, although I must complain that the great Gad-in-the-Galerie joke, which still makes me laugh just to think about, was over much too quickly.

Will was with us yesterday afternoon. He is shown above at the sprinkler basin in the playground at Carl Schurz Park. I was sure that he’d want to Get Wet, but, in the event, he didn’t, so he didn’t. Not long before, he had been asleep in his stroller, which I pushed to and fro with one hand while holding Bharati Mujkherjee’s Miss New India in the other. I finished Miss New India this morning, and I liked it very much; but I wish that I could put my finger on why the book struck me as “unsophisticated” and “old-fashioned.” You could say that it’s an exciting fantasy, in which a vibrant young woman is granted a very unusual chance to exchange the traditional life of her hometown in Bihar for a self-realizing career in Bangalore. Mukherjee handles the golden opportunity pretty realistically, but it is nonetheless dogged by the muffled creaking of machina. The material will come into its own as a feature film — a medium that will liberate the tale from the point-of-consciousness (not just -view) of a twenty-year-old girl from the mofussil who all too often “hasn’t the p’oggiest” idea of what other people are talking about. (To be fair, Angie/Anjahli gets her big break because she can actually say “foggiest.”)

On Saturday, we had brunch out on the balcony with my very first Internet friend, someone whom I met digitally over the Independence Day weekend in 1996. We had met once in person, already many years ago. This time, I was introduced to her husband as well, and the four of us had a lively conversation in a mercifull breeze. I had big plans for Saturday afternoon as well, but in the end I did nothing but read. Christianity, mostly. I’m loving that book! It was great fun, this evening, to see Dan Brown implicated as one of the “mediocre novelists” who imagine that Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene were man and wife. “Mediocre”: le most juste. What’s really exciting, of course, is reading church history, a field that used be owned by the Church! But no more. I’m deeply glad that I read Philip Pullman’s The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ a few months ago. I’ve been recommending it to everyone, although I haven’t written much about it here. More anon!

Before anything else, I have to share my father-in-law’s answer to yesterday’s question: it turns out that veal tenderloin has been masquerading under the name noisette de veau. I’ve certainly seen that on menus, and I may even have known what it was, once upon a time — a time when I was ignorant of meat cuts generally, and “tenderloin” was just a word. I maintain that I’ve never seen it for sale in a shop, under any kind of name. But I’m relieved to know that those tenderloins haven’t been going to waste. “Were they real?”, Kathleen’s father sighed when she told him what we’ had for dinner the night before. Oh, yes; they were real. 

Five or six years ago, at a gathering of bloggers (imagine such a thing now), I heard a number of people complain that they were having a hard time coming up with interesting things to write about. “It’s terrible! All I can ever think of is ‘What I had for dinner last night’!” I’ve written a handful or two of entries about that very subject, but I’ve tried to keep a lid on it — actually, keeping a lid on it hasn’t been that hard, because I’m rarely very interested, the next day, by what I had for dinner the night before, and certainly least of all when I can’t think of anything else to write about. When you have nothing to say, resorting desperately to ‘tried and true’ fallbacks is rarely a good idea, because if you’re not inspired by what’s new and different in your life — that is, if you can’t even see what’s new and different in it — you’re probably not in the best frame of mind for dusting off some old kitchen clichés. The problem with blogging remains, however, that of writing regularly, preferably daily. Even if nobody reads what you write, the habit of turning out a few readable paragraphs every day is one of the best that any writer can have — certainly the best habit that does not involve the judicious reading of other people’s writing. 

I’ve been reading Alan Jacobs’s engaging little book, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction. I have found it provocative in ways that I doubt the author intended. Quite often, I’m piqued by something that Jacobs has taken for granted — without, I believe, sensing that he was taking anything for granted. In the section entitled “Lost,” he recounts the story of William Cobbett’s intellectual awakening as a teenager. His eye was caught by Swift’s The Tale of a Tub in a suburban bookshop window, and he decided to spend his lunch money to buy it. He was so absorbed by the satire that he forgot his hunger and read until it was simply too dark to make out the words. “The lure of the book so compelled him,” Jacobs writes, 

that he voluntarily gave up a meal in exchange for the chance to read it; and the spell of the book, as he read it, was so strong that neighter hunger nor darkness could touch him. He was “rapt”; anyone passing him would have recognized that “eye-on-the-object look.” 

I have never known this rapture, ever. It is not within the gift of my nervous system to grant forgetfulness of bodily discomforts. I can postpone easing them, and when I do, invariably when I’m reading something exciting, narrative suspense is amplified by a measure of suspense concerning my ability to withstand privation. I don’t lose myself for hours; I am up and about every twenty minutes or so just dealing with the noise that comes from within my skin. I long ago learned how to minimise the disruption caused these distractions, and to suppress ones coming wholly from outside. I keep my house in order, to put very succinctly. The result is that I’m bemused by the trouble that people have with the distraction of the Internet. I don’t know whether to envy or pity the spellbinding enchantments of their pre-digital lives. 

But there’s more to it than refilling the tea mug and running to the bathroom. When I say that I never forget myself, I mean never. When I was young, this relentless self-awareness was crushing, and I look a lot of recreational drugs just to get away from myself (a desire that had nothing to do, I insist, with hating myself). Even LSD didn’t do the trick, though. Now that I’m at the other end of life, being aware of what I’m thinking all the time, of how I’m responding, say, to what I’m reading while I’m reading it, is no longer so crippling; it’s just the way I’m wired, and I’ve learned to live with it. And, as always when you learn to live with something, I’ve found distinct advantages in the persistence of my own company, as it were. It has taught me, for one thing, that pleasure is not a commodity, something that you go out and consume, but a harmony, a congruence between an experience and your state of being. (If you’re not in the mood, in other words, even Jane Austen isn’t going to cut it.) While I don’t believe that our pleasures are so personal, so idiosyncratic — so subjective — that we have nothing intelligible to say about them, I do think that it helps to know something about the context of a critical response. When it comes to writing about a given performance of music — to pick the sharpest case — I think that talking about my recollections of other performances is more illuminating than the attempt to pin analytical absolutes and mood markers on the event, and vastly more useful than an abstract dissection of the piece of music itself. Beethoven’s Eroica exists on paper, and much can be learned from examining the celestial mathematics of its score. But none of us has ever heard that symphony, nor will we ever. We have only heard discrete executions, fallen and imperfect from the point of view of strict realization, but occasionally unbeatably satisfying for all that. 

Thinking hard about all of this for several months, I’ve become uncomfortable with the patina of objectivity that I know very well how to spread over my commentary. During the golden age of print journalism, professional reporters made a religious tenet of burying personal responses, on the theory that no reader cared what a reporter thought, because who the hell was a reporter? Just a guy with a pencil. We think differently nowadays, but there remain occasions for sticking to the illusion of “the facts, ma’am — just the facts.” I’ve developed a trope for such occasions: I stick a virtual mascot on my shoulder and write in the first person plural. (The first person plural is wonderfully effective at wrongfooting any attempts to squeeze in the individual.) At my much-neglected Web site, Civil Pleasures, I intend someday to plant the reasonably expository pieces that can still be found a Portico, a site that I have abandoned. It will be very helpful, when I write those pages, to be able to refresh my memory with notes and recollection culled from more casual writing here. But in order to write here as often as I do, I have to keep it casual.

Instead of writing about Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris itself, then, I’m going to tell you how I got from the movie house to lunch. Oh, I loved the movie. I adored it! But that’s about me, not Midnight in Paris. As I stepped onto the pavement, I felt something odd right away. Instead of the usual post-glamorous-comedy letdown, in which I wish that my life were different, I came out feeling very happy about my life as it is. After all, the life that I’m living is such that I had only to walk across the street first thing in the morning to see a very funny movie chock-full of arty references that I grasped easily enough to appreciate the filmmaker’s skill at saving them from mere gratuity — and also a movie that functions even more incisively than any of its predecessors as an object lesson in Woody Allen’s profoundly cinematic sensibility, even as it casts ghostly highlights on earlier pictures (I was especially reminded of Shadows and Fog, but also of the portrait of a bad marriage — here a bad-marriage-to-be — in Crimes and Misdemeanors). I was alive to Allen’s extraordinarily adroit handling of his actors’ gifts; if there were absolutely nothing else to recommend Midnight in Paris, it would deserve immortality simply for the comic haberdashery of matching one of the funniest movie jokes ever with the particular funny-man talents of Gad Elmaleh. I was amazed that two of my favorite actresses on earth, Rachel McAdams and Marion Cotillard, had been dangled before me in a way that left me delighted, not discontented. It may look as though I’m talking about a movie here, but I’m not.

Then I turned the corner of 86th and Second, heading down to the Hi-Life for a club sandwich, and a new song came on the Nano. I knew what it was right away, because even though I had never heard this original version in my life I was very familiar with its Sesame Street knockoff, also featuring the singer-songwriter Feist: “1234.” How cool to learn this neat song from my grandson’s enthusiasm! How cool of Sesame Street, too, of course — but the fact is that I’m living in a world where these very nice things are happening. They start happening out in the world around me, but they end up happening in my head. Midnight in Paris pushed me beyond counting my blessings; it made me feel blessed.

It’s quite a bit warmer today, with intermittent sun poking through a threatening storm. The building’s air conditioning was turned on several days ago, before, for the first time in my memory, it was actually needed. I’ve got it on now, with the balcony door open, and it’s not unpleasant here in the corner, from which I can see everything even though, once I’m writing, I look at nothing. 

Shortly after she left for work, Kathleen called to tell me that José, the one doorman who has been here longer than we have, would be wanting to make an appointment with me when I eventually went downstairs. The building is changing the circuit breaker boxes in each apartment, and is scheduling two-hour blocks to do the work, during which time of course there will be no electricity in the rooms. No big deal for most people, really, but I want to be sure that all of the electronics are offline beforehand. This includes a lot of units that I don’t ordinarily touch, such as WiFi boosters and the NAS drive on which my iTunes and Quicken files are backed up. I’ve contacted Jay, the god of tech, and he has supplied me with what will make a useful checklist. So I ought to be all right. Unlike a real power outage, the replacement procedure won’t interrupt the water supply, so the inconvenience of sitting here while the box is changed won’t be too tedious. I say that now, now that I have scheduled an appointment for next week. My reaction to Kathleen’s news this morning was an urge to throw up. The idea of any sort of change was completely insupportable, and last year, when Ray Soleil installed the halogen ceiling fixture in what I now call the gallery, the on/off killed the modem. True, the modem dated back to Stonehenge — but no modem was an unthinkable predicament, even with my handy MiFi cards. 

Once I’d done a modicum of blogwork, I gathered up my housekeys and went to the Post Office. I had envelopes to mail to family members, containing sets of the postcards that I’d recently had made of photos from Will’s second trip to the Museum. I made up the envelopes last night, and addressed the remaining cards to a variety of friends, generally excluding Kathleen’s old friends, who will have to wait for the next set of postcards, ordered before I went to bed, which feature two images of Will and Kathleen looking at knightly armor. Moo, the outfit that makes the cards, has been amazing; I may have last night’s order early next week.

Of the six images in the last set of postcards, three are very dear to me and one is the standout favorite. I decided to hold on to an extra copy of this postcard, just in case. This morning, just-in-case donged in my brain. I realized that I wanted to send it to my friend JR in Paris — it was the very one that I wanted him to have. But where was his address? He had written it down in a notebook on his last visit. That sounds pretty hopeless, I know, but I had a fairly good idea of which notebook I’d had him use, and it turned out that I was right. So I printed up a label (thus entering the address into a Dymo file), pasted it on the card, and wrote “Greetings from Gotham” alongside. At the Post Office, I learned that the tarriff for sending postcards overseas is 98¢, so I bought a sheet of 98¢ stamps. As for the favorite image, I’m thinking of having Moo make it up into notecards. 

Like the Venetophiles in Judith Martin’s No Vulgar Hotel, anxious to distinguish themselves from “tourists” even though that’s precisely what they are, too, I’m uneasy about all this personalized stationery, which I love unreservedly but am not so sure that I would approve of on the receiving end. Moo, as I say, does a great job of producing a quality product at a reasonable price (and in no time at all). I, I like to think, take reasonably interesting photographs. And Will is of course the world’s first perfect grandchild, and an elf in front of the camera to boot. So I’m not crazy, am I? Oh, it’s no use; I know that Kant would not approve. 

My uneasiness is actually a highly refained sentiment that I owe to many attentive readings of Jane Austen’s Emma. In A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter, William Deresiewicz recounts his mounting horror at discerning the similiarities between himself, if he must be absolutely honest, and Austen’s heroine. Good reader that he was, he recoiled from the novel’s thunderclap at Box Hill, where Emma airly and inexcusably insults Miss Bates, with a flinch of self-recognition. 

Emma’s cruelty , which I was so quick to criticize, was nothing, I saw, but the mirror image of my own. The boredom and contempt that the book aroused were not signs of Austen’s ineptitude; they were the exact responses she wanted me to ahve. She had incited them, in order to expose them. By creating a heroine who felt exactly as I did, and who behaved precisely as I wdould have in her situation, she was showing me my own ugly face. I couldn’t deplore Emma’s disdain for Miss Bates, or her boredom with the whole commonplace Highbury world, without simultaneously condemning my own.

I read the first chapter of Deresiewicz’s literary memoir, which alternates between appreciations of Austen’s life and work and recollections of his own, with the most complete interest possible; I could not have been a less disinterested reader. I, too, had — have — grown up in Jane Austen’s tutelage. When I was young and unwilling to understand the point of good manners, I chafed at what seemed to be her insistence upon respectability, but I always knew that she was fundamentally right about things. I read her at first for her wit. Unlike Deresiewicz, I didn’t dislike Emma at all; I thought that she was a role model. How I should have like tobe rich and in charge! When Emma’s schemes fell through, I held others accountable. I blamed Mr Knightley for being such a sourpuss. I blamed Harriet for letting Emma down. I didn’t even bother to blame Mr Elton for anything; he was too hopeless, and too richly deserved Mrs E. I agreed with Mr Woodhouse on the subject of Emma’s perfection. Until, of course, that picnic at Box Hill. When Miss Bates sighs that she will have no trouble saying three very dull things — one of the options offered by the naughty game that Frank Churchill has proposed to the party — Emma can’t resist making explicit a concern that she has no doubt is universally acknowledged in Highbury. Foreseeing three very dull paragraphs, she obliges Miss Bates to be brief, and serve up her dull items at once. This is very terrible, but the first time I read the novel, I agreed with Emma, when she tries to defend herself against Mr Knightley’s wrath. “It was not so very bad. I daresay she did not understand me.” But then Mr Knightley lowers the boom.

She is poor; she has sunk from the comforts she was born to; and if she live to old age must probably sink more. her situation should secure your compassion. it was badly done, indeed! You, whom she had known from an infant, whom she had seen grow up from a period when her notice was an honour — to have you now, in thoughtless spirits, and the pride of the moment, laugh at her, hunble her — and before her niece, too — and before others, many of whom (certainly some) would be entirely guided by your treatment of her. 

My cheeks fairly smarted. And they still do, every time I read the passage, because I was a lot more like Emma than William Deresiewicz.

More anon…

Until a few minutes ago, the balcony floor (not shown) was uncluttered neatly swept. Then I discovered an infestation of some kind in the ivy in the living room. How long the bugs have been at play, I’ve no idea. I think of ivy as hardy, but I’ve had a lot of trouble with it indoors. It seems to require very frequent watering, and now this. I set the plants on the balcony floor and watered them well with a mild solution of Ivory Soap. We’ll see. Meanwhile, that bonsai tree on the table — Kathleen tells that it’s a Fukien Tea Tree (“Fujian, you mean,” I couldn’t help correcting) — seems to be recovering from replanting. It arrived from an online merchant in a broken pot, and by the time that Kathleen decided that she couldn’t be bothered to ship it back, it was looking pretty pekid. Repotting was nothing less than traumatic, because the roots were bound to the pot by a coiled copper wire that didn’t want to let go. When most of the leaves curled up and turned black, I thought that we’d lost it, but the outlook improved a day or two later, with a burgeoning of new growth. I’ve never had anything to do with bonsai before and would probably not have taken it up on my own. But caring for Kathleen’s orphaned tea tree has already given me a taste of mandarin calm. If it flourishes, I can’t help believing, then so shall I.

I had hopes of taking Will to the Astor Court this weekend; I thought that he’d enjoy running around in there for a bit, even though it’s not very big. But it was not to be; after a few weeks of bouncing good health, he succumbed to some sort of infection and was not his jolly self. We thought that he might rally on Sunday afternoon, but by the time I reached his house in a taxi, his fever had spiked again, and I simply stayed in the cab and came home.

There was plenty to do. And I managed to do plenty, notwithstanding the temptations of Donna Leon’s new Guido Brunetti book, Drawing Conclusions. I finished that this morning. It’s one of her best — or perhaps it’s one of her most typical. The action is set entirely in Venice. Signorina Elettra Zorzi has at least two comic duets with Brunetti, and one of them is followed by a cabeletta which Brunetti muses on the beneficent small-bore corruption that makes society work in spite of itself (at least if you are a Venetian). There are two lines of plot stretching away from the dead body in the first chapter, so you know that one of them has to be a red herring. More than that I really cannot say at this time, because I might spoil a clue. While working in the kitchen, I watched Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges, the black comedy with Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, and Ralph Fiennes that I had to see as part of my Thekla Reuten festival. (When I saw the movie in the theatre, I didn’t know who she was, if you know what I mean.) For the most part, however, I worked. It was discouraging to spend hours tidying up the balcony — really tidying it up, like never before, really — only to be kept from enjoying it by the unseasonable gloom. The weather could be worse, of course; the weather in Joplin, Missouri has been a lot worse. But we’ve all had enough of damp and chilly dark days. We’re so demoralized that it’s hard to look forward to anything. And now this: bugs! On en a ras le bol! 

As for today, it was a Monday. It was impossible to believe, in the early afternoon hours, that I would do any of the things that I was supposed to do. I couldn’t imagine it! Somehow, force of habit took over. I don’t know how many feeds I read (or marked as read) before the outstanding number of unread feeds dropped below the thousand mark, but I’d guess that it was about five hundred. I read most of the Book Review, and most of it seemed inane. Was this just me? Was it the cold that I felt coming on? Was it my deep desire to dive into Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Christianity, a book that I’ve denied myself for some reason?

In prospect, reading Christianity seemed not just pleasant but dutiful. I’m finding Alan Jacobs’s book-length essay, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, unduly freighted with the titles of books that, in my opinion, don’t belong in or near discussions of Middlemarch. The fact that Jacobs is a biographer of CS Lewis goes far to explain this. As I read the book, which advocates, quite rightly, reading for pleasure, a vague sense of something amiss crystallized in the realization that too many writers about reading have forgotten — perhaps they’ve never known — that history at its best has a literary excellence that no fiction can match. I’m thinking of books like George Dangerfield’s The Strange Death of Liberal England or any of CV Wedgwood’s books about Seventeenth-Century Europe. William Doyle’s history of the French Revolution is not thrilling on absolutely every page, but its grasp of the tragic tensions of the upheaval is complete, and quite beyond the range of any conceivable cinema. Jonathan Lears’s recent Rebirth of a Nation has to be the most sobering, not to say depressing, history of the United States every written by an American. These books are packed with the excitement and suspense of gothic fiction — and they’re all true to life! At one point in In Bruges,  Colin Farrell’s character dismisses history (of which Bruges is so redolent) as “a lot of stuff that already happened.” I wanted to shake him: No! History is the stuff that is still happening!

I like to think that Donna Leon would agree with me.