After an extraordinarily productive afternoon of paper-sorting — how much more agreeably effective it is to pick up where I left off a few days ago, instead of reinventing the forgotten wheels spun off by work done six months ago — I realized that I’ve misplaced the Fancy Lady Tea Set. I put it away (not paradoxically) for our tea party two weeks ago. The Fancy Lady Tea Set consists of a flowery teacup and saucer, famille rose if you must, a Royal Albert creamer in apple green with flowers that I ought to be able to describe given that it has been there, so to speak, since before I was born, and a new English teapot with an oval footprint, covered in flowery decals. These items of bone china rest on a disc of silver tray that’s just big enough for them. The ensemble is not quite kitsch, but it’s the sort of thing that would not so long ago, by a certain class of woman, be considered “faine.”  The other day, Kathleen actually complained – jocularly  — when I did not give her her afternoon tea on it. (I hadn’t missed it yet, but another teapot was handier.) When I find it, I’ll take a picture. The problem with this apartment is that there are dozens of places in which something like the Fancy Lady Tea Set might be misplaced — and also none.

The Bach in Order project continues. Two out of the five playlists are complete, and when the next shipment from Arkivmusic comes in, bringing two recordings of the French Overture, two more playlists will fill out. The fifth list will be presentable, if far from finished, when the Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields recording of Corelli’s Opus 6 arrives. This morning, I rummaged through the closet where all the CDs that are still in their jewel boxes are stacked. (When we gave the CD shelves to Ms NOLA, there were eight yard-high stacks in the closet, but I’ve been working on them, and now there are only seven.) I was looking for a recording of the Goldberg Variations made by Zhu Xiao-Mei. It was recommended to me by a Luxembourgeois banker at a conference in Bermuda in 2000. (I remember hearing someone across the table ask Kathleen, “Why would anybody want to by shares in an ETF?”) The banker said that Ms Zhu’s was simply the best recording out there. I haven’t listened to it in some time, but I recall that it is very good. I’ll hear it later this afternoon, when it comes up on Bach in Order III.

 This morning, Kathleen tried to remember a line from a famous skit. Happily, the text was near to hand, so we were able to get it right.

Basil: Well … may I ask what you were hoping to see out of a Torquay hotel bedroom window? Sydney Opera House perhaps? The Hanging Gardens of Babylon? Herds of wildebeeste sweeping majestically….
Mrs Richards: Don’t be silly. I expect to be able to see the sea.
Basil: You can see the sea. It’s over there between the land and the sky.
Mrs Richards: I’d need a telescope to see that.
Basil: Well, may I suggest you consider moving to a hotel closer to the sea. Or preferably in it.
Mrs Richards: Now listen to me; I’m not satisfied, but I have decided to to stay here. However, I shall expect a reduction.
Basil: Why, because Krakatoa’s not erupting at the moment?

That’s from Communications Problems, with the great Joan Sanderson as Mrs Richards, seen here with Andrew Sachs in the immortal Dexter Haven rally. This all came up because of the terrible earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand. Kathleen wondered how Krakatoa’s eruption measured on the Richter scale. The answer to that question is: VEI 6 (“colossal”); Krakatoa (Krakatau, Indonesia; 1883) was a volcanic explosion, not an earthquake.

And where are my Brian Mortons? All four novels are missing. I must have done something “clever” with them. Perhaps I put them in a “special place,” with a view to writing them up as a group, or having a second look. Perhaps I let somebody borrow all of them. (What a long and miserable old age of senior moments I am bound for!) I was reminded of Breakable You the other day by Woody Allen’s You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger — the first Woody Allen movie that I didn’t see in the theatre in a very long time. (Chalk it up to “The Year of Being a New Grandparent” — a long list.) In the film, the character played by Josh Brolin passes off the manuscript of a dead friend as his own work, and is all set to reap huge undeserved awards when it turns out that the friend isn’t dead — it was somebody else who died — but only in a coma. Coming out of which he’s showing signs. It’s very dark and very funny. In Breakable You, a famous but dried-up writer absconds with the manuscript of a rival who really is dead. And he gets away with it. Three years ago, I wrote,  “Although — as Adam rationalizes the matter — the thing that he does (it will go undescribed here) causes no material harm to anyone, it is so dishonorable that the pages fairly curl in the reader’s hands.”

Earlier, over the weekend, I watched Whatever Works, in which Larry David stands in for Woody Allen. I adore Whatever Works. I love the vaudeville relish with which Allen turns his characters and their contexts on their heads: Patricia Clarkson’s Marietta, for example is transformed (as if in The Metamorphoses) from a pious Southern Baptist who believes in beauty pageants to a gypsy-ish downtown photographer who sleeps with two men — all in the same bed. Her lovers, who are colleagues, discover her with a too-good-to-true enthusiasm that pokes fun at our sophisticated resignation when faced with strange doings in foreign movies; we learn not to doubt what we don’t understand. Marietta’s fame requires us to accept what we know never really happens. And it does so with a look-ma-no-hands vitesse that we can only giggle at. The other thing that I love about Whatever Works is Larry David’s Schopenhauerian bleakness: to him, life is a bad joke that condemns him to spend time in the company of “microbes” and “inchworms” (other people). The pessimism pours out of him like carefully decanted beer. Watching him kvetch, I remembered bouts of similar despair when I was in college — and, bingo! I got it: Boris is a preserved adolescent who has never outgrown his smart-alecky but hypertense uncertainty not about what the future will bring (he knows what that is: death) but when.

Also missing: the Levenger bookweight that belongs in the living room. Will was playing with it. I remember seeing him put it down somewhere, but I don’t remember where that was.

What’s the good of having a refrigerator without someone to play with the magnets?  

Here in New York, the weather is unseasonably warm, and no joke. Thinking it a bad idea to overdo the spring-feverish liberation from heavy clothes, I wore what I’ve been wearing lately, minus the sweater and the scarf. A mistake; I got quite hot, running an errand up to Carnegie Hill. I was tempted to take a taxi home, but I couldn’t decide what to do for lunch. The Shake Shack, as you can imagine, was crowded, with a line threading along the window from the door — and then down the stairs, of course; it would have taken forever to do lunch. And I’d left my copy of the London Review of Books at the movies, dammit.

That’s not like me, but I was so bowled over by Unknown that it was all I could do to collect my jacket and my shoulder bag. I’m not going to appraise the plausibility of the screenplay; the best thing to be said about it was that it is never implausible. That’s because what happens to Dr Martin Harris seems so implausible to him, and Liam Neeson knows how to make Martin’s befuddlement so agonizing to us, that we’re not inclined to evaluate the likelihood of anything. The acting is superb all round — even January Jones is riveting — and Berlin provides a sleek and cosmopolitan setting. (The famous Adlon Hotel lends its services, presumably suffering no damage that CGI can’t undo.) The action is breathless but never incoherent.

Unknown depends upon the audience’s misreading of the opening scene, in which Martin and his wife, Liz (Ms Jones) fly into Berlin, where Martin is to make a presentation at a science conference. If you’ve seen the trailer for the film, then you know that Elizabeth is going not only to deny knowing Martin at the conference but also to claim that another man (Aidan Quinn) is her husband Martin. It’s quite the nightmare, but only if you make the assumptions about Martin and Elizabeth that the film wants you to make.  In this way it is different from the Bourne movies, where Jason Bourne, like a patient in analysis, seeks to retrieve memories of a past that trauma has erased. Martin Harris’s trajectory goes in the opposite direction. He wakes from a coma, four days after an accident, alarmed to discover that only he knows who he is.

Diane Kruger, who played the vampish counterspy in Inglourious Basterds, is fierce rather than glamorous this time; she playsGina, an illegal immigrant from Bosnia whose palette of hardscrabble jobs run from driving a taxi to waiting in cheap restaurants. Although Martin promises to make it up to her for bringing so much trouble into her life (and, in the end, delivers on his promise), Gina comes across as Martin’s scrappy protector, almost a patron saint. She’s physically fearless (at least behind the wheel of a car), and she has enough common sense to make up for Martin’s lack of it. Among the supporting actors, Bruno Ganz stands out as a ruminative former Stasi detective who meets his own end with courage; he seems to have seen everything and thought about it all at least twice. Other German actors who make Unknown a first-rate entertainment include Sebastian Koch, as a brilliant genetic biologist, Rainer Bock, as the Adlon’s manager; and Karl Markovics and Eva Löbau as the doctor and nurse who care for Martin during his coma and afterward. All I can about Frank Langella’s contribution is that you know that he’s playing a very bad man just by the way that he sounds like a really nice one.

I always sit in the back of movie theatres because I don’t want to risk blocking someone else’s view, but today I had another reason to be glad that there were only one or two people sitting in rows further from the screen: it hit me at the end that I must have put on quite a show myself, what with all my flinching and ducking and wincing and eye-hiding. If possible, Unknown is even more viscerally challenging than Mr Neeson’s last adventure, Taken. You can see why I forgot my LRB.

The picture of Will that I wish I’d been able to take would have shown him darting about the apartment with his left hand in his father’s and his right hand clutching a yardstick with the authority of a rudimentary Wotan (or Siegfried, maybe). At one point, he stood still enough for his mother to determine that he is 31 inches tall. He is thirteen and a half months old.  And quite pleased with himself: when he replaced a refrigerator magnet after having just pried it loose, he applauded himself in his soundless way — he doesn’t bring his hand all the way together. In my own soundless way, I applaud his parents.

 

I left my cap at the restaurant where a friend and I had croques monsieur for lunch today. Happily, I missed it right away — when, crossing Madison Avenue, I stepped into the sunlight; it was still frigid, but my scalp went into immediate sunburn alert — so we didn’t have to retrace too many steps. As we turned the corner by the restaurant, I saw my cap hanging on a sort of post just outside the door. My friend assured me that I had not put it there myself. I was a bit put out; why would the restaurant staff put my cap outside where anyone passing by might take it? “Because they knew you’d be back in ten seconds, it’s so cold,” said my friend. There was no arguing with that; it’s exactly what happened.

***

Tidying the bedroom yesterday afternoon, I watched Les Choristes, Christophe Barratier’s heartwarming reform-school film, starring Gérard Juqnot. Even before it began, the sight of M Juqnot on the menu screen choked me up, and I wept more or less copiously through the movie. If you haven’t seen it, Les Choristes is about a discouraged musician, one Clément Mathieu (M Juqnot) who takes a job as prefect at a boarding school for troublesome boys. The headmaster is a monster who believes in “action-reaction,” or crime and punishment, and every infraction is punished lavishly. To put something positive in the lives of his wretched charges (who are, however, amply troublesome and always up to some mischief), Mathieu forms them into a chorus. Barratier isn’t so naive as to propose that the transformative power of music &c tames the boys’ savage breasts. It’s Mathieu’s interest and concern that restores their faith in humanity. The music is lovely, though. I should not have thought that Rameau could make me blubber like a baby. 

Gérard Jucqnot plays a very similar role in Faubourg 36,  Barratier’s other movie. Patiently self-effacing, bottomlessly good-natured, a careworn saint. Has anyone in Hollywood specialized in this kind of role? Aside, that is, from Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton; has anyone played such parts earnestly, not for laughs?

When Les Choristes was over, I had the most awful sinus headache.

***

In a recent email, a good friend shared a dream that she’d had — about us.

I had a very strange dream the other night involving you and Kathleen. I was in your apartment admiring a lovely glass-fronted bookcase and Kathleen said that the two of you had decided to get rid of it. I asked what was going in its place and Kathleen responded ‘a guillotine.’ When I asked where one would get a guillotine, Kathleen told me that she found one that could be rented for $600.

I wish that I could tell you why I find this so funny, but I can’t, and it’s not because I don’t know. It’s because I don’t want to get anybody into trouble. Let’s just say that, if there were no repercussions to the use and enjoyment of a guillotine in the privacy of one’s home, aside from the $600 rental fee, then somebody in that dream — and I’m not saying who — would definitely arrange to have one delivered immediately.

It has been a long winter. “Everyone’s being crabby,” said Somebody, “and I’m being crabby right back.” 

Tomorrow, we are going to have a party. It will begin in the middle of the afternoon, as a tea party, with just that: tea and coffee and lots of sweets. Later, a plate of cheeses will appear, along with carafes of white wine. Later still, I’ll bring out a roast tenderloin of beef, accompanied by oversized dinner rolls (or undersized hamburger rolls, if you prefer) and appropriate condiments. Sounds pretty simple, doesn’t it? Now that it’s too late to make any real changes, I’m sorry that I didn’t “make more of an effort.”

For example, I could have made my own cheesecake, and bought two fewer  cakes from William Greenberg. (My own cheesecake is to die for, although strangely it hasn’t killed me yet. It is really a custard composed of quarts of cream, tubs of cream cheese, and — well, not dozens of eggs, but it feels like it. (Somewhere in there is a little sugar and vanilla.) How about a plate of deviled eggs? And those ham rolls, stuffed with (yet more) cream cheese. Why didn’t I go through my records, such as they are, and concoct a sentimental journey through parties past?

You’re reading the reason why I didn’t. The site, I mean. I wasn’t about to turn my back on it for a few days while I fooled around in the kitchen. Since the beginning of the new year, I’ve juggled two priorities: writing as much as I can here, with three entries a day on weekdays and the Grand Hours on the weekend; and spending time with my grandson and his parents. Plus all the everyday stuff (it pains me that women who read this will have such a clear and distinct idea of what this means, while to men it will be a vague business, not to be looked at too closely). Now, in order to have something to write about, I have to do a few more or less interesting things, not to mention a lot of reading. Add a few hours a week for managing the music library, take note of the fact that, at 63, I’ve slowed down a bit, and bear in mind that Kathleen and I talk with one another more every day than the average married couple does in a week (and then double that), and you’ll see why I have no time for party planning. Not yet, anyway.

That I’m sitting down doodling, the night before anywhere up to fifty people fill our apartment, about this and that, instead of panicking — well, it’s partly old age, and the loss of ambition that comes with experience. But it’s also the really extraordinary amount of time that I’ve put into putting the house in order. Well-arranged closets don’t have any direct bearing on the success of a party, but they do conduce to a well-arranged host, one whose mind is not cluttered with half-forgotten details about where things are. Not where things having anything to do with a party are. Just things. Stuff. I’ve been de-Collyerizing the apartment, seriously and methodically, for eighteen months now.

Even so, I can’t find the apple-green cake stand that I’d completely forgotten about until I came across it a week or so ago — but where? It would come in handy with all the cakes that I’ll be serving. But it doesn’t matter, because in the end the party won’t be about the cakes that I bought and the hors d’oeuvres that I didn’t make. It’ll be about the friends who show up, some of whom, in the classic New York manner, we won’t have seen since our last party. I trust that we haven’t mislaid any of them.  

This afternoon, Will and I paid our first social call. Until now, our Sunday walks across the East Village have always had the same destination, St Mark’s Bookshop, on Third Avenue at Stuyvesant Street. I’ve longed to go someplace where we might take off our coats, sit down for a minute, and visit. The “visit” part, of course, would consist of my showing off my grandson to admiring friends. But that’s putting it crudely. Will would show himself off, without any plugging from me. And that’s exactly what happened today.

From the moment that I unzipped his snowsuit and sat him on my knee, he behaved like an angel — and angel who dropped a lot of crumbs on the floor, but an angel all the same. He munched on bits of mini-cupcakes from Le pain quotidian — our hostess bought them specially for our visit — and took a few sips of water. But it was obvious that his attention was held by new people and new surroundings, and not once did he attempt to place himself at the center of ours. After half an hour or so, I felt that we had visited for long enough, and I zipped Will up without any making any announcements. I had to be helped a bit with his arms and legs; this was the first time that I had taken him out of the Becco carrier, much less unzipped his coat, without one of his parents’ being in the vicinity. Getting him back into the carrier was awkward, too, but Will didn’t complain.

When we got back to Will’s house, his mother was a little bit anxious; we’d been gone for almost two times longer than ever before. And Will had fallen asleep as we walked thorugh Tomkins Square Park. Was he okay? Watching Megan peer at him with concern just about sank me, but as I lifted him out of the carrier he showed all the desired signs of life. Waking up, he looked just like hisGreat Grand Uncle Fossil after a nap — faintly surprised to find himself on Planet Earth, still, but deeply pleased to have stolen a few Zs.

But I’d forgotten that I’m an old man. Buoyed up by the mildness in the air — it wasn’t warm by any means, but there was no bite to the temperature — I’d walked across the East Village as if I were worried about being late, which is standard whenever I’m doing something for the first time. When we got to the house of our friend (whose delightful contribution to our Valentine’s Tea next weekend gave me the delightful idea of picking it up at her house today) I was a Niagara of perspiration. I was even damper when we got back to Loisaida Avenue (via St Mark’s Bookshop, natch). I didn’t stay long at the O’Neills’; I wanted to be sure of catching a cab before the witching hour of 4 PM. I asked to be dropped off at Agata & Valentina, where I picked up a few supplies (but not the pancetta that was on the list that I’d — left at home; just as well; the charcuterie counter was mobbed). When I walked back outside, my undershirt went chilly, and I knew that I’d better get home and into dry clothes as quickly as possible. What I didn’t expect was that the moment I sat down, showered and dressed, I’d feel totally bushed. Well, duh. (But that’s why Advil was invented.)

When we crossed Second Avenue the first time, I pointed uptown and told Will that Doodad’s place was eighty-two blocks thataway. “That’d be a long walk! But we’ll do it someday.” After today, the sky’s the limit.  

 

Before dinner last night, I was sitting here in the living room with my friend Eric. We were talking about a new novel that we had both read, and all of sudden I felt flush, because I’d just heard Eric tell me that he had written a blurb for the book’s dust jacket. How had I missed this? I don’t read blurbs; I may glance at the names of the blurbers — and in this case, I’d  recognized two names but unaccountably missed Eric’s. It was probably just as well; if I’d know about his blurb while I was reading the book and talking about it to friends, I’d undoubtedly have dropped a lot of fatuouscomments about knowing someone who’d written a blurb &c a friend of the author &c. But my reputation as an observer was severely dinged.

Then, this afternoon, I couldn’t find the American Express bill. I hadn’t seen it come in, and my suspicion is that it was misdelivered; there’s been a lot of that going on lately, whenever our regular mail deliverer is off duty. After a lot of dithering — I hate to talk to credit cards company representatives, doubtless the long-term aftereffect of decades-old impecunious traumas — I called American Express and arranged for a replacement to be sent. No problem. Meanwhile, the outstanding balance that was due this month, which I also asked for, seemed very high. Without the bill in hand, I couldn’t analyze the figure, and I experienced a variation of another old waking nightmare, not being able to remember what I did last night. It took a while to calm down enough to remember some hefty up-front expenses at the dermatologist’s. This brought the balance due into line.

I’m not going to bleat about senior moments or incipient dementia. The plain truth is that this sort of thing used to happen all the time, because I paid little or no attention to things that didn’t interest me. Tedious details were a crime against nature. The consequences of this lackadaisical outlook were not pleasant, and I was often put into quite a fugue state by the fruits of my shambolic disregard. I don’t know when I discovered that life was a lot more agreeable if I made an effort to put things where they belonged, and if I made a point of paying the bills once a month. But it doesn’t come naturally, and if I couldn’t rely on slowly but surely developed habits, I’d break down every day.

I expected, back in 1985, that the personal computer would make a good substitute for the personal secretary, and it took about twenty years for me to realize that that was never going to be the case. Ever. I can’t tell you how much time and wretchedness I poured into teaching desktops and laptops how to manage my home. Beyond using Quicken to write checks — but wait, you say; you’re still writing checks? Oh, yes, indeed; without the bits of paper hardcopy, I wouldn’t know from one week to the next where I stood. I have become a heavy user of pads and pencils.

When Kathleen got home last night, we had a very nice dinner — but one that would have been better if I’d remembered to season the sauté de boeuf à la Parisienne with salt and pepper.

My friend Eric’s account of his holiday trip to Paris reminded me not as much of my own three visits as of my fear that I would never get to Europe — a fear that overshadowed the first half of my life, or nearly. I was 29 when I finally got to go — late in the day for someone who had committed the English succession to memory in grade school. I was to go to Angers in my sophomore year at Notre Dame, but my life fell apart for a while before that could happen, and my sophomore year turned into a second freshman year spent very much in South Bend. And once I’d graduated, I was more concerned about getting back to New York than with making it to Europe. My scheme for getting back to New York via law school ultimately worked, more or less, but it turned out that I crossed the Atlantic first. My mother died, and my father took me to Europe in her place.

In an impish comment at Sore Afraid, I suggested that the trip was booked before cancer treatments killed my mother (this was in 1977). Of course that’s not true. All we were thinking about for most of 1976 was whether the doctors would turn out to be right about how many months she had to live. They were. Oh, and one other thing: how to relate to a woman who let it be known from the first inklings of illness that her demise was not to be discussed. Her last words to me, which I could barely make out (to her towering frustration), were: “Did you put the leftover ravioli in the freezer?” We’re talking big-time denial here. Mother was dead within the hour, as we were driving home from M D Anderson.

Soon after that, my father developed throat cancer. At least, his doctor was worried that that might be what had turned his throat a chalky white. By now, the trip to Europe was booked. It would be a road trip, just like the trips that my parents loved to take wherever they were, even if it meant hiring a driver. I truly believe that my father’s favorite thing in life was to zoom along an Interstate Highway at 110 0r 120 mph, preferablyin Kansas, bombing from El Dorado — a town that exercised a mysterious attraction for him, perhaps because there was a super deluxe motel there — to Kansas City. I think that he liked it best when my mother was doing the speeding. They really loved their cars, which may explain why I’m just as happy not to own one.

We would fly to London and then to Paris, my father and I. From Paris we would drive straight east, through Munich and Salzburg, to Vienna. Then would fly to Ireland, spend a few days at Dromoland Castle, and come home. I can’t say that I was looking forward to all that driving, but in retrospect I think that it would have been the best part of the trip — which was not canceled because of Dad’s throat cancer. Dad didn’t have throat cancer. The white stuff on his esophagus had been deposited there by aspirin tablets, which my father had fallen into the habit of swallowing without drinking water. We did go to Europe after all. But once we were there, Dad’s life fell apart. He discovered that I was not the fun traveling companion that my mother had been, and his mourning commenced in earnest.

It started on the flight over. I was cross because we were seated in coach. For seven years, I had not flown on a commercial airliner, much less in coach. I piggy-backed rides (rarely offered) on company planes. I got used to driving up right up to the jet, and even more used to climbing the stairs without a thought for the luggage, which was stowed by the crew. It turned out that I have a natural and abiding affinity for first-class travel. If I have to settle for less, I’d just as soon settle for staying home. I know that now. I was only beginning to learn it as I sat next to Dad in the vastness of Pan Am’s steerage. I tried to distract myself with a book. For the life of me, I can’t remember Dad’s exact words, but it amounted to a request for conversation that, ungrateful wretch that I was, I couldn’t think how to grant. I was too busy worrying that one of the large families occupying the center bay of seats would produce a farm animal.

Also, after all those years of neat little Havillands, I couldn’t see how a 747 could stay airborne. My fear of flying blossomed two flights later, crossing the Alps in a Caravelle. For the duration of the flight, my body fairly screamed its conviction that the plane was locked in a whistling descent, hurtling toward the Matterhorn. Conversation was once again out of the question.

We were on the Caravelle, and not in a sedan, because — d’you know, I forget why? Every morning, in London and then in Paris, Dad announced that we’d be going home the next day. I think that he substituted the flight to Vienna just to do something. A premature return to Houston would have entailed embarrassing explanations. And even Dad knew that I wasn’t entirely to blame for not being Mom. Nor was I to blame for the doctor’s visits, at the Grosvenor House and the Intercontinental in Paris. Both of them declared that he must stop drinking if he wanted to stop falling down. So we flew to Vienna for the few days that we’d meant to spend there, and found that our hotel room was wallpapered identically to the dining room in our Bronxville house, which my parents had (treacherously, as far as I was concerned) abandoned for Tanglewood in 1968. Maybe the wallpaper made the mourning easier. Maybe it was the fact that I had no real agenda in Vienna. My father sat through a pops concert with me — that’s all that was on offer, what with all the real musicians off at various summer festivals, and I remember thinking that I’d be the only person in nearby St Stephen’s if I got to an organ concert ten minutes earlier. I had to stand at the back of the nave, a nice little lesson in Viennese musicality. By the time we flew to Dublin, I was almost out of the doghouse. But only almost. Dad blew his top when all the books and records that I’d bought in the three capitals added sixty dollars in surcharges.

In Dublin, we spent the night at the Gresham. I did not sleep; the sound of pub-crawlers never let up. But I must have dozed, because in the morning I was awake enough to get behind the wrong-sided wheel of a car for the first time in my life and drive right across Ireland. And now that we were in a car, my father and I really had fun. I don’t know what we talked about, but there was laughter, and I basked in his admiration of my driving skill, which was largely exhibited in a series of near misses with death. What fun that drive across Bavaria would have been! Plus, it would have kept us on schedule. Now we were arriving at Dromoland castle — a first class hotel if ever there was one — a few days early, and they weren’t ready for us. We had to stay in a motel on the property, a decidely non-super deluxe motel. That was all right; we spent the days driving all over Counties Clare and Galway. Aside from the Cliffs of Moher, the ruins of an abbey, and an unspeakably flavorless tapioca pudding, I have no recollection of seeing anything. It was wasn’t important. Driving was important. We drove around, as aimlessly as teenagers, and had a blast.

Dad did not fall down in Ireland. He almost fell, but he caught himself before he tripped over me. I had given up on the bed and was trying to sleep on the floor — surprise!

After doing some research, Dad discovered that Aer Lingus wouldn’t impose TWA’s luggage surcharges, so it was in an Irish brogue that I learned, midway across the Atlantic, that we’d be landing at JFK in the middle of a blackout. How would that work?

Even the snow is tired of falling. It hangs, floating in midair, drifting every way but down. Or so it seems.

Snow or no, I must go out today. I must go to the Post Office, my least favorite place in town, not excluding the colonoscopy clinic. If you could see our post office — it’s called “Gracie Station,” but all grace ends with the name — you’d understand; it is one of the dreariest relics of Fifties functionalism that’s still standing. A blank barn of a room with too much fluorescent lighting and counters that look as though they’d been thrown up in an emergency, the place makes you wonder if Joe Stalin didn’t win the Cold War, after all. Because this is a place where you expect to have your papers examined by petulant and capricious clerks who might just for the hell of it dispatch you to a gulag. I won’t say that the post office clerks are nasty, but you can’t wonder that they hate working there. It doesn’t help that the neighborhood’s affluent citizens rely on their office mail rooms, setting an Emma Lazarus default on the already cheerless atmosphere.

And I’ve a yen for Shake Shack that nothing else will appease. This is just the day for sitting outside, no? I think, if I get there early enough, there won’t be a crowd and I’ll find a table inside. But I never do get there early enough. That’s to say that I don’t even try, because by the time I’m ready to leave the house it’s too late.

I hope that the snow isn’t spoiling Will. Who knows when we’ll have so much again? Not that we played in it on Sunday, when I took him for a walk. We watched the dogs in Tomkins Square Park, coming and going (completely different crowds), trudged down Ninth Street to St Mark’s Bookshop, comme d’habitude, and stopped at Dinosaur Hill on the way back. When he is in the carrier, strapped to my chest, Will doesn’t interact with the world very much, although this week he did give the dogs some attention. But the moment he was planted back on the floor, back at home, he made a beeline for the front door and beamed at me with Harpo-Marx intensity.

Something else that he did that was neat to watch: he was playing with something at the table that was not food. At least twice, I saw him push it to the edge but then stop pushing. He’s done the gravity thing. For half of last year, he broke me up by staring down at things that he’d just given the heave-ho to, as if his special eye-power would levitate them back up. He appears to have tired of that experiment.

Now, if I can just throw on some clothes really quick and get out of here…

… success! Shake Shack was super, and I had a table to myself the entire time. I read Matthew Gallaway’s The Metropolis Case while I nibbled away at a Shackburger, krinkly fries, and, of course, a chocolate shake.

But was I trying to make predictions about how awful the post office would be? Three windows were open: one for special delivery and supplies, one for stamps and money orders, and one — just one — for all the other things that you have to go to the post office to take care of, because they’re cumbersome and time-consuming. The minutes flew by like hours, without anyone in the entire joint moving more than an inch in any direction. Just one. But it got done.

The Fighter, on the face of it, would not seem to be my kind of movie, and I went to it reluctantly. I did think that I ought to see it, and not just because of the Oscar buzz. Mark Wahlberg and Amy Adams are two stars who have never let me down, and I’d heard really great things about Melissa Leo. I’d like to say that Christian Bale was a draw, too, but although his work has always been interesting, it has also seemed intended to cloak the actor in plain sight, as though movie-making were the best way in the world of maintaining a very private life. It is also true that Mr Bale has never to my knowledge played the part of a character whom I’d want to grow up to be. Certainly this last part hasn’t been changed by David Russell’s film. Even after his dramatic conversion experience, Dickie Eklund remains an unattractive piece of work. But I came out of the theatre thrilled to death by the power of what I’d just seen, and I hope that no one will miss The Fighter because it’s “about boxing.” 

And it is about boxing. There were passages of family drama that led me to suspect that the pugilistics might be backgrounded, but that’s not what happens. In fact, I have never seen a movie that made boxing look so interestting. The final bout transformed me into a Mexican jumping bean, swaying with each blow; it’s a good thing that I sit in the back of the theatre. While nothing could ever make a boxing fan out of me, I saw that Mr Russell had always kept in view a distinction that Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg) makes at the beginning, when he’s explaining boxing to Charlene (Amy Adams). There’s brawling, which is just guys exchanging blows, and there’s boxing, which is more like chess. Comparing boxing to chess might sound laughable, and most filmmakers would ask us to accept it on faith, but Mr Russell provides something close to a laboratory demonstration of the similarities. In almost every boxing scene that I’ve ever sat through, there’s a sense from the start that the fighters are giving their all to trying to win, as quickly as possible. But that’s not Micky Ward’s game, That Ward has a game is interesting. 

But I didn’t care about The Fighter because of the fighting. The multi-credited screenplay is a match of sorts between two venerable story lines. The one is a family tragedy: a heroic character isn’t strong enough, or mean enough, or whatever-you-like enough to step outside a toxic family circle, possibly because he is as addicted to the company of his relations as they’re addicted to trouble. The other is the modern American tale of rehab. The moment in which we find that we believe in the rehabilitation of Dickie Eklund, a former crack addict ( as well as the boxer who taught his little brother Micky everything he knows), the family tragedy story turns into a comeback story, and a very believable one. By this time, Micky has put together a team of supporters who agree on nothing so much as the importance of keeping Dickie out of Micky’s life. When Micky can’t decide between the warring camps (which we’re inclined, even though the movie turns out not to do, to see as good guys versus bad guys), his new friends leave him, and you think, uh-oh, so much for Micky.

But Dickie is awakened by their defection; and instead of taking advantage of his restored command of the field (as Micky’s trainer) he reaches out for the defectors’ support. As Charlene and O’Keefe (Mickey O’Keefe plays himself) understand, Micky’s dependence on his brother’s good advice is not weak or self-destructive: Dickie really does know the best moves. He also knows his brother better than anyone else. They don’t like Dickie, but they know that, so long as he’s clean, they have no good excuse for not working with him, so they undergo conversion experiences of their own. (Ms Adams is so good at registering the course of Charlene’s faith in Dickie that you think that you’re reading her mind.) It’s at this very point that the boxing story sweeps to the foreground for a stirring climax — a climax that would work out very differently if Micky’s various friends weren’t determined to get together to support him. 

Melissa Leo plays Alice Ward, the much-married mother of nine, among them the two boxers and six harridan Valkyries who hang out in her home and amplify her signs and signals. Alice is very much a type, but I’ve never seen the equal of Ms Leo’s impersonation. A hard and brittle hustler who’s too sentimental to grasp that she routinely favors her black sheep son, Dickie, over the straight-shooting Micky, Alice is all but blind to Dickie’s addiction. She’s as out of touch with reality as any of Tennessee Williams’s wilting Southern belles, but, being a lot tougher, she is not broken by the shattering portrayal of her family in an HBO documentary that is shown midway through the film. It’s unclear what she knows in advance about this project; one suspects that she has taken Dickie’s assurance that it’s about his comeback as the pride of Lowell, Massachusetts at his word. In fact, we don’t know different until just before the broadcast. The subject of the documentary is crack, and how completely it can ruin the life of someone like Dickie. It ends with his being led off to prison. In an addled attempt to raise money for Micky’s training, Dickie impersonates cops and shakes down the johns who pick up his tarts. It doesn’t take long for this scheme to come crashing down around him. Even for Alice, though, “documentary” doesn’t mean quite what it ought to, and when Dickie comes out of prison, she is almost eager to resume enabling him. She at risk of helping both of her sons right back into disappointment and failure. If The Fighter has a disappointment, it’s that Ms Leo is never given a scene to correspond to Mr Bale’s. 

Whether or not the filmmakers intended any such message, I watched The Fighter as itself something of a documentary, about the failure of our economy to provide millions of Americans with meaningful occupations even as it drowns them in consumerist trash. It is difficult to imagine why anyone with a interesting, well-paid job would take up professional boxing, and The Fighter does nothing to make it any easier.  

Lordy, am I tired. If I weren’t so tired, I’d finish that there sentence with an exclamation point, but I’m not up to the shifting. I couldn’t get out of bed this morning until eleven. I spent most of the afternoon reorganizing a closet. There are freshwater fish with more interesting things on their minds. I read Tony Judt’s piece about trains in the New York Review of Books. It was exactly congruent with my thoughts about the future of transportation; when I think of the future of this country, I see a solitary state taking shape along Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor line. As I say, though, I’m much too tired to develop these thoughts.

If we were not going to dinner with a friend, I would try to take Kathleen to see True Grit this evening. That’s why I saw it on Friday, and not something else: I was vetting the violence, which, in the event, turns out to be nowhere near as great as we had been led to believe. (It’s not as violent as Fargo, for example — probably because you expect more shootouts in Nineteenth-Century Arkansas than you do in contemporary Minneapolis.) Such violence as there is is usually clearly foreseeable, giving Kathleen time to cover her eyes. (I covered mine during that scene with the rattlesnake; it did no good at all.) As I say, though, we have a date to do something else.

If I weren’t so tired, I would fast-forward through the Brahms piano sonata that is playing right now. I never know which is which; they all sound the same. Ponderous. You can see why pianos in Brahms’s day had to have such stout legs: all that pounding! I thought that repeated exposure on one or two of the playlists would teach me to love them, but it’s not happening. As I say, though, I’m too tired to think of anything else to play.

Pray that I don’t fall into my soup.

 

 

When? When was the last time I went to a movie on Friday? I don’t remember. But I went today. I saw True Grit, across the street. It’s a big beautiful movie, grander (visually) than any other Coen Brothers movie that I’ve seen (and I’ve seen ’em all, with the exception of No Country For Old Men). Hailee Steinfeld, who just turned fourteen, is amazingly composed and convincingly old-fashioned. In fact, the movie captures the pioneer rigor that inspired women to avoid anything like a casual speaking manner, but Ms Steinfeld’s air of knowing how she is going to finish every sentence before she begins to speak it is one of the movie’s great strengths. She brings all the gravitas that her costar, Jeff Bridges, always leaves behind in his trailer. The interesting thing about Matt Damon’s appearance in the film is that he plays the part of a supporting actor extraordinarily well. Anybody else, and you’d be saying, “How nice to see this gifted actor in a meaty role. Maybe now he’ll be famous.” Josh Brolin is extremely interesting, too, but I don’t think that anybody’s going to be saying similar things about his performance. The part is not quite big enough for that kind of praise, and Mr Brolin is such a convincing bad guy – a modern-day narcissist in long underwear — that you just can’t wish him well.

Then I came home. Usually, after a movie, I go somewhere for lunch, but today was unusual: I was going to meet a friend from my undergraduate days at Notre Dame, whom I hadn’t seen since, in the middle of the afternoon, and I had no appetite. I stopped in for a demi-baguette at the Food Emporium, thinking that I’d make myself a hero and eat a bit of it, saving the rest, but the only loaf that they had, which I bought, turned out to be whole wheat. I might eat whole wheat bread by itself, but never, ever in a sandwich. So I freshened up a bit and got ready to head out. Then I received a very nice email.

I’d love to say more about it, but it seems that do so would be clumsily indiscreet. I wrote to someone who is related to someone whose letters I’ve been reading. Acute readers will have no trouble figuring out whom I talking about when I say that, when you Google this gentleman (the relative, not the letter-writer), you get a lot of returns that have nothing to do with him at all, in which his name is interrupted by a semicolon, because his father, who was a well-known midcentury author (but not  the writer of the letters that I’ve been reading) wrote a book about one of the best-known of all American writers. So much for clues.

I wrote because I was dying to know more about my letter-writer — actually dying, it felt. The book in which the letters appeared said nothing about the writer, which galled me. So I wrote to the writer’s relative, and the writer’s relative wrote back to me, and it was both very sweet and deliriously futuristic, because that’s the world that we live in now and I sometimes can’t believe it: Like what you’re reading? Google! The best part: it turns out that the relative and I share a great love of the music of Emmanuel Chabrier. How wonderful is that? You write to someone about somebody else and find out that you have this great common interest with the someone! That said, I’d spent the morning anxiously worrying that I’d never hear back, or that the response would be unpleasant. When you write to someone whom you don’t know, and who of course doesn’t know you, you open yourself up to vastnesses of feeling foolish.

As I didn’t, in the event, feel foolish, I whistled my way out the door and set out for the border between Chelsea and Herald Square, where my classmate was staying. I got there first by minutes, feeling the whole time that I had ventured on foreign travel. My friend would be astonished when I told him that I never left Manhattan Island during the whole of 2009; the truth is that, aside from unadventurous forays to MTC’s theatres and Carnegie Hall, I spend no time whatsoever on the West Side of the island. It might as well be in New Jersey or Pennsylvania, and it felt like that rather when the time came to head home. It was dark; it was rush hour. There were so many people on the sidewalk, and I had no clear idea of where the subway stairs would be. It was not unpleasant; I didn’t come away thinking, let’s not do that again anytime soon. But it was foreign. In a city so densely packed with millions of people, it is possible to travel far in the space of a few miles.

It was very, very good to see my old friend, who is, very simply, a special person. I thought so when we were in school and I think so today. He’s warm, deliberate, richly intelligent, sweet, and utterly unaffected. I always felt like a pompous ass in comparison. I was a pompous ass absolutely, but I felt it most when Philip was around; and yet I could never hold that unpleasantness against him. This afternoon, I felt like something of a luftmensh when it came time to explain what I do with my life to Philip’s lovely wife and lovely daughter, but I’m glad to have met them, and I look forward to seeing Philip again very soon, because it is grounding to spend time in his company.

I hasten to add that Philip and I didn’t keep up after college, that it was a note from him, triggered by something that he’d run into on the Internet a few years ago (this was before Facebook, I think, but perhaps I’m wrong), that brought us together again. Just as it brings me to you.

The city is going white once more, but this time, one expects, without the pileup. Not that we were inconvenienced in the slightest by the post-Christmas dump. It wasn’t until the beginning of this week that I noticed the ramparts of garbage bags that lined most streets. Most of them are gone by now, too.

I woke up with a cold. How serious a cold remains to be sneezed. I was tired all week. Thinking that perhaps I was no longer equal to my holiday bibulousness, I cut back night after night, but to no avail; the mornings, once I was up, I always felt headachy and listless. This malaise would pass during the afternoon. Yesterday afternoon I spent on my feet, alternately preparing dinner and playing with the new shredder.

We have never thought it necessary to keep a shredder at home, but two weeks ago I discovered a pile of fat folders stuffed with all of our monthly billing records from 2000 and 2001, plus credit-card account statements reaching back into the Nineties. Tossing the papers down the chute, with identifying information on every page, seemed rash. So I went over to Staples on Lexington Avenue and bought the cheapest shredder on offer. I bought the cheapest shredder because it was also the smallest; I couldn’t imagine how I would house the ordinary run of units, which ranged from medium wastebasket to clothes hamper in size. The smallest shredder is not the most efficient; its bin has to be emptied constantly, and it quickly overheats. But it will fit in the hall closet in its box (which makes a great temporary wastebasket for the shreds). I don’t expect to use it very often. But I kept it busy all afternoon yesterday — what with all the cooling-down periods.

Trying to decide how to spend the day in bed, I’ve settled on finishing Sarah Bakewell’s How to Live: or, a Life of Montaigne. This was, to my mind, the best book of 2010, and I can’t imagine being a blogger and not finding it of the greatest interest. Montaigne’s textual remains would be far easier to sort out if he had been writing in the digital age; as it is, his Essays would be a vast untraceable palimpsest if had had had a mind to correct what he wrote. Instead, he was happy to add to it, more the doubling the length of his original collection in a bit more than ten years. He left two “final” drafts when he died, and disagreements between them have generated ongoing contentions between proponents of what’s called the “Bordeaux Copy” and of the edition published by Marie de Gournay in 1595. (The recent Pléiade edition, Bakewell tells us, reverts to the long-deprecated 1595 publication.)

Sarah Bakewell’s book is a delight because she tells us how Montaigne wrote, how he lived, and not what he thought. If you want to know what Montaigne thought, there is no reason to read anything but the Essays themselves; and you will do well to avoid simplifying explanations by other hands. Montaigne is an invaluable writer because he captures the ever-shifting appearance of life as we live it; he is not interested in rigorous principles, seeing them for the reductions that they are. As a result, Montaigne does not make sense. His sentences are always intelligible, but his chapters are not; sometimes it is not clear what he is really talking about. Comparing the first edition to the later ones, Bakewell hits on extremely apt imagery.

It filled only two fairly small volumes and, although the “Apology” was already outsized, most chapters remained relatively simple. The often oscillated between rival points of view, but they did not wash around like vast turbulent rivers or fan out into deltas, as later essays did.

Montaigne’s texts may be messy, but they are prodigiously fertile.

Taking breaks from How to Live, I’ve tidied up the apartment from last night’s rout and fixed myself a small sandwich: sliced tenderloin, red onion, and Swiss with mayonnaise on a dinner roll. If I’d bagged the leftover rolls last night, it would be heaven, or at least quite a bit less crumbly. I’m thinking of making a loaf of bread with dinner-roll dough.

For a few years, we had the custom of celebrating the year’s three anniversaries at La Grenouille, and I hope to revert to it later this year, but it appears that we’ve taken a break through a full cycle. We missed Kathleen’s birthday in April and our anniversary in October. The arrival of Will had something to do with this; certainly Kathleen’s onerous workload in the Fall made the prospect of dressing up for a lavish dinner more burdensome than delightful. And now we are on the eve of my birthday, and, what do you know, I’m cooking myself. If everything goes as planned, we will be eight at table tomorrow night, from Fossil, the oldest, to Will, who of course just turned one.

Last Friday (New Year’s Eve), I prepared a lunch for four to welcome friends from Geneva, and I put a fair amount of thought and effort into it, such that I wasn’t in the mood, when I woke up this morning, to be taking pains in the kitchen. So I settled on the easy and royal route of beef tenderloin. I’ll roast the thing in the oven and serve it with a sauce of chanterelles in cream. We’ll start with a vegetable risotto — leeks, corn, and poivron. As long as I was at Agata & Valentina for the tenderloin, I picked up one of their opera cakes.

Oh, and asparagus — always asparagus. With one of the egg sauces that ends in “aise.”

The thing is, I watched Julie & Julia twice. In the kitchen. I’d worked my way through a series of pictures about anglophones in Italy — Up at the Villa, My House in Umbria, and Under the Tuscan Sun. That’s when I got my hands on As Always, Julia; so the next movie had to be Julie & Julia. I watch kitchen movies while I’m in the kitchen, pausing them when my work is done. I’m talking about movies that I’ve seen tens of times. I didn’t really mean to watch Julie & Julia twice, but when I went into the kitchen to fix dinner and hit the “play” button, what came up were the closing credits. I couldn’t think of anything else that I wanted to watch, so I just played it again.

Watching Nora Ephron’s movie once might inspire anybody to whip up an interesting meal or two, but watching it twice has the opposite effect. The ladies are almost always hard at work at something, and Julia, of course, is always well turned-out. Julie actually claims to make her aspic with a calf’s foot, a stunt that at my most wildly ambitious (twenty-odd years ago) I never attempted. Who knows what we’d have had for lunch last Friday if the double-single-feature had played out last week! Here’s what we did have: salmon mousse. A very old-fashioned salmon mousse, made from a recipe that I got from a friend who insists that she is not a cook — a recipe that calls for a blender. And a can of salmon. I bought a pound of arctic char and poached it, and dissolved the gelatin in a ladle of the bouillon, but I followed the recipe with regard to the mayonnaise — it called for Hellmann’s — instead of making my own. If I’d watched Julie & Julia first, I’d have been ashamed to cut so many corners. No calf’s foot? You call Knox gelatin cooking?

The chanterelle sauce is an outgrowth of one of my favorite dishes, a sauté of chicken with mushrooms. At some point last year, I had the idea of thickening the sauce with cream, and there was no going back. Bubbly thickened cream and sautéed mushrooms combine to produce the compleat savoriness of umami.

There are readers who will no doubt insist that any meal involving hollandaise or béarnaise sauce is not simple, but there are a few clever things that I’ve done so many times that I don’t have to think about them, so that fuss is not involved. Call it recklessness, rather: whisking eggs and butter over direct heat is asking for trouble. I go into a mad sort of trance, moving the little saucepan to and from the heat as if it were on a bungee cord and throwing in dice of frozen butter (that’s the trick of it) until there’s no more butter, and the sauce is perfect.

One of the treats of watching Julie & Julia twice while reading As Always, Julia is piling up instances of anachronism in the Julia parts. Almost every mention of Avis DeVoto in the movie is contradicted by letters, at least as regards when things happened. (This is not a problem; the alterations all make for a better movie.) And of course Avis DeVoto plays a much bigger role in the book! Julia Child’s epistolary style will be familiar to anyone who has actually read her cookbooks (and not just followed the recipes), but Avis DeVoto’s voice is quite different, racier somehow, and enthusiastic in a way that makes Child seem ladylike by comparison.

Your news about your transfer to the south is staggering. I didn’t even know that Paul was in public service. Is it State Department? Of course I share your regrets about leaving Paris — but I am certain that you can work out the details of the cooking research, and as you point out, there’s all that wonderful Provençale cooking. Frogs legs, Provençale — ah me. Until the old Lafayette Hotel in New York folded up, every New York trip took me straight to that ugly dining room to eat frogs’ legs dripping in garlic and butter, and their gratinéed potatoes which were the best in the world.

I’d much rather be reading Avis DeVoto than struggling with the book that she brought into being.

Will was here today — his father brought him up for a visit — and here’s what I wish I had a photograph of: when it came time to go, I took his hand and walked him into the bedroom, where Kathleen was taking a nap, so that he could say goodbye to Darney (as she is to him). As we crossed below the bed’s footboard, Will’s left arm shot up. It was as though he were dying to answer the teacher’s question, but there was also a touch of revival-meeting hallelujah. I knew what he was trying to tell me, thanks to a tip from his mother: Will has a settled preference for being held by his left hand, the one that I wasn’t holding. I complied immediately; but I thought how interesting it is that Will’s media arsenal doesn’t include vocalization. The sounds that he makes — and he’s becoming quite a singer — are for his own enjoyment. I wonder what he makes of us, the grandparents who talk more or less incessantly. Or do I: he probably knows that we’re enjoying ourselves, too.

(On the elevator, coming or going I forget which, a group of women noticed Will’s eyelashes, which are preposterously long, just as Peter O’Toole’s eyes are preposterously blue. There are predatory insects that would kill to have Will’s eyelashes for antennae.)

The Sunday after the holidays — is the feeling of letdown inevitable or, as Kathleen puts it, is it a “really don’t want to go back to work tomorrow” state of mind? I certainly don’t want to go back to work — and I’m my own boss! The first couple of weeks, if not the first few months of the New Year are going to be difficult, largely because I’m hugely unhappy with WordPress, the platform on which this Web log is produced. For a long time, I was used to being unhappy with WordPress, but when I began to meditate changes (improvements) for the New Year, I saw that we must part, WordPress and I. Four years ago, I broke up with MovableType. Now I’m thinking of breaking up with blogging itself, and reverting to my happy old ways of rolling out a Web site. But enough about housekeeping. (Thursday is my birthday; I am almost sixty-two years older than my grandson.)

The other day, at Crawford Doyle, I spied The Empty Family, a new collection of short stories by Colm Tóibín. I hadn’t heard a thing about it, probably because Ms NOLA is out of town for the holidays. Wednesday was the 29th of last year, and I read most of the book in 2010, but the copyright notice dates the book to January 2011, so I have really been living in the future these latter days. Three stories stand out — although before I say another word I have to confess that I did not re-read “The Colour of Shadows,” which appeared in The New Yorker a while back. I skipped over it and went straight to “The Street,” which is more of a short novella than a long short story. Imagine Brooklyn, only set among the Pakistani community of Barcelona instead of the Irish community of King’s County, and with a young gay man in the spotlight. Was it written before or after the novel? Also striking: “The New Spain,” in which a lapsed Communist returns to her native Catalonia after the death of Franco and, basically, gives her family the finger. (I don’t even want to think about where Tóibín got the chained refrigerator bit.) There’s also a lovely story, “The Pearl Fishers,” in which the narrator is as vinegary as the author. I’ll save my thoughts about the “graphic sex” in The Empty Family for a reading note. Note to Migs: I’m sending you a copy, and you (and the author) know why!

My friend JRParis wrote a lovely valedictory for 2010 that matches Tóibín’s gift for melting appeal. Jean lists a few of the things that he did last year, but even more things that he didn’t do. Near the end, a calamity that always strikes me as American, even though it killed Camus: one of Jean’s friends died in an automobile accident. That’s all that he says about it, and his late friend’s name is the only one in the entry. In the hands of a lesser writer, one might be annoyed, but Jean prompted me to mount a very discreet roadside  memorial to Francis Grossmann; if I don’t know anything about the dead man himself, I will remember his name, and who but a gifted writer can make anybody do that?

Kathleen is finishing up Guns, Germs, and Steel. “I’m loving this book,” she says. I told her she would — how many years ago? But her curiosity was piqued when Ryan saw it on a bookshelf in the blue room and mentioned it as a book that Megan really ought to read. The next time I read something that I think my wife would like, I’ll have to figure out a way to get Ryan to recommend it to his! (There’s a crazy Golden Bowl vibe humming there that I’m not going to explore!) Kathleen’s next book: The Help. I am very proud of having recognized Kathryn Stockett’s book as a deserving best-seller when a pre-publication copy was sent to me; the Manhattan publishing mafia has still refused to do justice to this wonderful novel.

A few weeks ago, Will started pointing at things. Sometimes he means: “I know what that that is,” but for the most part he’s telling us that he wants got get closer to (ie possess) something. I had a little game with him today of pointing back. This delighted him. He stretched forward and pretended to bite my index finger. Meta Meta Meta!

For someone wishing to remain a communicator of words and concepts, this poses an unusual challenge. Gone is the yellow pad, with its now useless pencil. Gone is the refreshing walk in the park or workout in the gym, where ideas and sequences fall into place as if by natural selection. Gone too are productive exchanges with close friends — even at the midpoint of decline from ALS, the victim is usually thinking far faster than he can form words, so that conversation itself becomes partial, frustrating, and ultimately self-defeating.

That’s the late, great Tony Judt, writing earlier this year about the impact of ALS on the life of the mind, in The Memory Chalet. I quote the entire paragraph, but it is only the second sentence that concerns me here. I had to put the book down when I read it; I was overcome with envy and regret. In my case, “natural selection” has ordained a disconnection between thinking and doing. Nothing shuts my mind down with grimmer efficiency than physical exercise. No, that’s not right: my mind isn’t shut down; it’s reduced to a dreary concentration camp. My imagination is bound and netted by the essential pointlessness of exercise: doing nothing (from an intellectual point of view) is a waking nightmare. “Refreshing walks in the park”: I must ask if the phrase has an actual meaning in my life. It doesn’t, not in Judt’s sense. A walk in the park, with no mindful destination or purpose, is simply a succession of dumb steps. A walk to the bookstore requires the same number of steps, but my mind is alert — in pursuit of the contents of a book, or perhaps only the pleasure of bookstore bookchat. And  the only thing that I can compare a workout in the gym to is a weird sort of self-induced rape, where you make yourself have sex with someone whom you don’t want to touch and whom you don’t want touching you. If that’s hard to imagine, then you can see why I don’t belong to a gym.

I know what Judt means by “natural selection,” because I’ve seen it represented in the movies. Ron Silver, in Reversal of Fortune, comes to mind. He’s playing Alan Dershowitz, who is playing basketball in his driveway. Suddenly Dershowitz stops, or, rather, he doesn’t stop suddenly, it’s as though suddenly the life were beginning to drain out of him. But it’s only the energy that basketball requires; that energy is being diverted to his brain, where a breakthrough in the von Bulow case has just been announced. The breakthrough has presented itself; Judt might as well have written “magically,” and, as we all know, magic can’t happen if you’re peeking. Dershowitz stops playing basketball and gets back to work, his vigor manifestly renewed. The lesson is clear: it’s important to stop thinking altogether, sometimes, and to abandon yourself to physical challenge. Otherwise, you’ll never figure anything out.

But that doesn’t work for me. As I say, I can think things over while I’m walking to the bookstore, or to the theatre, or to any destination at all, so long as I am not walking for the sake of walking. And walking is obviously the only permissible activity: there is no call for running or jumping, no point to strenuous exercise other than indulging it for its own sake, which stops thinking cold. I do a great deal of reaching and carrying in my householding life, and I spend hours standing in the kitchen, but none of this is exercise; it’s just life. I’m usually thinking about what I’m doing: dusting a bookshelf, or sorting through the papers in a folder. Interesting thoughts fly by every now and then, and I’m trying to discipline myself to stop to write them down, not as dashed-off notes that won’t make any sense an hour later, but with an intelligible imprint of context, as if to capture what the thought felt like. For the most part, though, I do my thinking when I’m reading, writing, or talking. It’s only then that I’m informed by the sharp and vital editorial voice that tells me that I’m mistaken. Without that, my mind is a foggy blob.

This isn’t to say that I never enjoy a refreshing walk in the park. I do! But it’s only when the thinking has been done, the long piece written. And the walk is refreshing because there is nothing to think about. After a good walk, my brain settles into an ox-like stolidity that is blind to abstraction. It is something like sleep. My mind takes a while to wake up. During that time, I don’t mind being stupid; I’m too stupid to care. I can’t imagine that Tony Judt was ever stupid for a moment. 

I spent five hours at the Hospital for Special Surgery this afternoon — that’s why I didn’t schedule a Daily Office. That, and my not feeling very well. Owing to nobody’s fault in particular, I was discovering that I can’t quite make it for fourteen weeks between Remicade infusions. Thirteen, yes; but no more. Days into the inadvertent fourteenth week, I was having to think twice before leaving the apartment, because my colon had reverted to its natural, irritable state. I’d run out of Remicade molecules! The last thing I wanted to do was languish in hospital waiting rooms, but I would only feel worse if I gave into that declension. I wanted to stay home because I needed what I’d have to go to the hospital to get.

It’s a very nice hospital, Special Surgery. I’ve certainly never been in a nicer one. That has something to do with the parts of the body that are treated there, bones and their integuments. The limbs that stretch away from the brain and the thoracic organs. No heart disease, no cancer, no emphysema. There may be unimaginable pain and crippling, but it isn’t, for the most part, potentially fatal. There is a sense in which every HSS patient is an athlete on the mend. We’re all getting better — and that’s obviously great for staff morale.

But the hospital also takes advantage of its location. The waiting room for Radiology and the visiting areas for inpatients all overlook the East River. That’s an understatement; they’re on the East River. Which regular readers know is a strait that flows in both directions, depending upon the tide, bearing ships and barges and police cruisers and sailboats and even (idiotic) jet-skis. No matter how bad you may feel, the misery of being shut away in a fluorescent hell isn’t making things worse.

So I felt better the moment I arrived at the hospital, an hour early for my appointment with the rheumatologist (a Facebook friend, by the way) who always looks me over before infusions. When I last saw him, in September, he ordered some X-rays of my cervical vertebrae, just to be sure that carrying my growing grandson around isn’t the reason why I’m suddenly capable of slight nodding: my neck really isn’t supposed to move at all at this point. It was inevitable that I would put off actually having the X-ray until my next visit to the hospital, i.e. today. What wasn’t inevitable was that I’d go to the hospital an hour early because I felt so lousy that I’d just as soon be in a hospital. It was even less foreseeable that I would start feeling better, as I say, as soon as I got there.

From 2:15 until 3, I waited for an X-ray slot. At 3, I put that wait on hold and went upstairs to see the rheumatologist. I was back downstairs by 3:25, and by 3:35 I was sitting in an X-ray room in my undershirt. (It’s cold in New York!) It took a long time to get all the X-rays, because, you see, my neck doesn’t move, and this confounds a lot of everyday technician wisdom. The guy who took my pictures was smart enough to know what he didn’t know, and a whizbang colleague was brought in at one point to kibitz. Radiologists were consulted, as well as the rheumatologist. I was feeling so much better by this point in the afternoon that, frankly, there wasn’t much to distinguish me from Norma Desmond; of course I was difficult. Or, rather, my body was. I myself couldn’t have been more obliging. I held odd positions for long stretches without a whisper of complaint. At one point, my butt was hiked up on a huge triangular ridge of foam, while my mouth roared wide open in silence. “Don’t breathe!” When it was all over, the technician thanked me for being a “good patient.” But of course, Mr De Mille! It was 4:30, time for Remicade.

The nurses at the Infusion Therapy Unit — only one of whom, Sara, was there when I paid my first visit, seven years ago next April — were Doodad’s best friend when it came to cooing over Facebook pictures of Will. Sara herself pronounced Will “one happy little boy.” Earlier, the rheumatologist, who seemed to have all the time in the world to hear about Will’s eager appetite for asparagus and mushroom soup, beamed at me and said, “I don’t know you know you, but I know you well enough not to be surprised that you’re a big softie about your grandson.” I took that as a compliment. Also as a suggestion to lose weight.

At 7:10 — I was so eager to be up and going that I wanted to offer to drink the last few milliliters of Remicade — I dashed out into the night, eager to catch Kathleen on her cell phone; she had just landed in St Louis for an overnight business trip. I got a taxi right away — and why not? New York was going my way. Every hospital stay should be as restorative as mine was today. I could swear that the Remicade is already working.

This is how it is: I circle and circle and circle, like the Labrador retriever I grew up with. I am not going to settle down until the conditions are right, and the orientation is correct. Star — so called for the obvious reason, a patch of white on her brow — rarely spun more than six revolutions. I’ve been circling for over a year.

But then, I’m a human being; even lying down is more complicated. Mere comfort isn’t the only consideration. Sometimes, the reason for my not saying anything amounts to no more than the difficulty of deciding where to say it. Here, at a blog? Or at Civil Pleasures, contrapositively out of time, bookishly permanent? Where to keep a diary? Where to talk about the movie that I saw last Friday (Wild Target) but still haven’t found the moment for commenting on? Circling like Star, I say nothing.

So I thought that I would at least acknowledge the circling.

From the very start of my Web site life, back in 2000, I’ve been perplexed by a division that gets absolutely no attention. Let’s say that I’ve jsut read a great book — Hans Keilson’s Comedy in a Minor Key, say. How to write about it? You can’t say anything about this book that will be truly interesting over the long term without talking about what happens at the end of the book. Why? Because, at least as I see it, Comedy in a Minor Key is a book about  an Adam and Eve whose expulsion from paradise does not involve a physical dislocation. Nor do this Adam and Eve sin — on the contrary! But how to write about all of this without worrying about spoilers? I want to write something that will be interesting long after everyone has read it, has — as I believe will happen — been taught the book in high school. I’m not particularly interested in recommending it to people who haven’t heard of it: there’s no future in that. (Imagine writing a piece for readers who had never heard of Hamlet.) And, given my conviction that you get more out of a story if you know how it comes out, I am not sympathetic to readers who treasure what really does seem to me to be the meretriciousness of “surprise.” Comedy in a Minor Key was surprising for me only because the review in the Times was incompetent. I’d have enjoyed it more, on the first read, if I’d known where it was really going.

Circling, then, until I figure all of this  this out. And circling about plenty else, too.

¶ My adoptive mother, who died at the age of 59 in early 1977,  was born today in 1918, on what came to be known as “false Armistice” day. My daughter will celebrate her next birthday on Thursday next, the anniversary of the actual end of World War I. Just being born between Scorpios wouldn’t have been good enough for the likes of a Capricorn like me.