Monday was the only entirely free day last week. On Tuesday, I paid an overdue visit to the podiatrist, and an even more overdue visit to Bloomingdale’s, where I replaced the tattered wallet that I replaced years ago but put back into circulation after my pocket was picked one overlubricated evening circa 2005. Then I went to Lady D’s for lunch. I tried very hard to leave before four o’clock, and managed to depart at half-past three. Lady D always claims to enjoy listening to me talk, a compliment that, while perfectly sincere, makes me feel slightly bilious — perhaps because I know that I could talk until six. The weather was so beastly hot that I did not stop in either at the storage unit or at Agata & Valentina, both on the way home, but took a taxi straight to the front door.

On Wednesday, something snapped in the tank of the commode in Kathleen’s bathroom. I called for the handyman, and proceeded to fret for him to arrive in time for my lunch and Wednesday errands. Most distracting! He came soon enough, but of course he realized right away that he would have to turn around and “get a part.” While he went out for the part, I got back to work in the blue room. When the handyman returned, he cried out. I still don’t know just what he had done or forgotten to do, but the bathroom was flooded, as was the corridor leading to our bedroom, and water was pouring over onto the foyer floor. About an hour later, all was more or less in order — although the carpet, of course, still stinks to high heaven. I mopped up a lot of the water while waiting for the handyman to come back a second time, with another handyman and a heavy-duty vacuum cleaner that sucked up the remaining water. I did get down to the Hi-Life for a club sandwich, and then I got a haircut, as I do now every other Wednesday. Then I ran a few errands on Madison Avenue.

On Thursday, of course, Will was here, bright and early. Kathleen was still asleep when he arrived, and I carried him to her bedside to wake her up. Will, who had a fit once when I assumed my faux sportscaster’s voice (something that anybody who has worked in radio can produce), smiled weakly at Kathleen for a moment and then burst into tears. Perhaps if Megan had been holding him at the time? I’m not sure: Will seems to have definite ideas about our appearance. He and his mother did not stay to dinner, because they were having a sort of party after work at Megan’s office, and she wanted to show off her boy. Had been truly conscientious, Knowing that I’d probably be out for most of Friday, I spent the evening composing the next day’s Daily Office.

Another doctor’s appointment kicked Friday off. It didn’t take long and I had plenty of time to make the first show of The Switch, which got a terrible review in the morning’s Times. I loved it. I can see why Steven Holden didn’t, but I took the movie on entirely different terms. Afterward, I had lunch with Quatorze, and then Ms NOLA came up for a cup of Summer Hours tea — after which we went to the Museum to see how the bambú was coming along. Then we walked over to Agata and bought the fixings for dinner, which Ms NOLA was graciously helped me to prepare. We settled on a risotto with shrimp, fennel, and cherry tomatoes. It was extremely yummy. There were only three of us at dinner — Kathleen came home at “a reasonable hour” — but there was enough risotto for six. Ms NOLA assured us that she would take the leftovers home and enjoy them for breakfast. Yes!

One of my newer routines is to tidy up the bedroom on Friday afternoons, so that it’s done in the event that Kathleen wants to sleep in on Saturday morning. Obviously, I never got to any of that on Friday, but there was no risk of Kathleen’s sleeping in, because we expected a business friend of Kathleen’s from Kuala Lumpur for tea at three. When our friend took off for Newark and the long flight home, I hunkered down in the kitchen and cleaned out the refrigerator. This has become an activity that reminds me of weeding the garden — when I had a garden. Then I did the same with the pantry.

None of foregoing activities is at all interesting to read about, I know, but they make a pile-up that explains, to me at least, why I didn’t get more done here last week. I’m trying to establish reasonable expectations, but budgeting one’s time is never fun. I long for the buffer of an extra day — a sixth weekday, say — but I know that it would very soon cease to be buffer, and the persistence of such foolish hopes has begun to annoy me. There won’t be any extra days any more than there will be extra millions or extra lifetimes. This. Is. It. What’s sad about it is that I went through nearly sixty years without any such sense of urgency.

Come to think of it, Monday wasn’t entirely free, either. Jason Mei came to install a backup drive — two backup drives, “mirrors” — for my ever-growing iTunes files. There was something going on every day of the week! And in the middle of August, too! Oy!

The bacon at breakfast this morning was extra-delicious, doubtless because it had been cured by a special twenty-minute session in a cold oven.

Or, you could say that breakfast was twenty minutes late, because I forgot to turn the oven on when I slid the pound of bacon onto the middle shelf. In this alternative interpretation, the bacon was delicious because Oscar Meyer’s Hearty Thick-Cut is always delicious, even when the pieces are structurally unsound.

I got the trick of baking bacon from the Silver Palate girls. It’s very simple: line up the strips on a rack in a roasting pan and bake them in a 400º oven for forty minutes, turning once after twenty. When people ask me for this “recipe,” I say, as slowly as I can, “Forty. Minutes. at Four Hundred. Degrees.” The rule of fours, no? Of course, the advantage of cooking bacon the regular way, in a frypan, is that you know right away if it is “benefiting” from the “cold cure.” And you get your cooked bacon a lot faster, too — once you turn up the heat. But these are not advantages that the true bacon connoisseur will savor. Baked bacon is magnificently evenly-cooked and crisp, and there’s hardly any need to “drain” it on paper towels. Though of course I always do. Even when the bacon is twenty minutes late.

I coped with the delay by prepping a bunch of leeks and a packet of mushrooms for a quiche. And when the breakfast dishes were running through the dishwasher, I composed the tart, filling the sink with fresh dirties in the process. I baked the crust, purchased at Eli’s not long after Agincourt (and probably a “sweet,” rather than a “savory” shell), and let it cool. Then I tossed in the filling, beginning with the boring stuff, the mushrooms and the leeks. After this, I took a scissors to three slices of thick-cut bacon, and grated a passel of cheddar over the top. Then I stirred these ingredients, thinking how much easier it would have been to stir them in a bowl. Finally, hunted down a print copy of the recipe. I have most details of Julia Childs’s Quiche Maison in my head, but owing to age, and to the creation, by means of eminent domain, of vast new brain regions devoted to adoring my grandson, I couldn’t remember a) how many eggs or b) how hot or c) how long. (Answs: 3, 375º, 35-40 minutes.) Yes, the mushrooms are my interpolation, and, yes, I know that a proper quiche Lorraine has no cheese. Lots of places have no cheese. We don’t have to be like them.

Then I made lunch. It is my settled philosophy that Sunday lunch ought always to be grander than Sunday dinner. Not lunch but luncheon. My current idea of Sunday lunch is a salad of chicken or fish dressed with mayonnaise, avocado, curry and lemon. My ultra-current idea of additions to this mixture involves sautéed corn and steamed poivron (that’s “Bell pepper” you, bub). Today’s fish, which I poached on Friday, was salmon trout — a fish that always made me want to fret, “Make up your mind!” until I bought a piece by mistake two weeks ago, and found that Kathleen preferred it to just plain salmon. It makes a delightful, rather sweet, salad. The only thing that a cook needs to know, beyond what I’ve already rattled off, is that I blend half the avocado into the dressing and cube the rest. Avocado two ways, as they say in the garde-manger.

Along the way, I refilled the ice-cube bin. The bin holds six trays of ice cubes — it holds more than that, actually, but the freezer won’t take more than six trays. If you want to know how I’m doing on the domestic front, all you need do is check my ice-cube bin. If it’s full, I’m on top of things. If it’s half-full, I’m still fine. If it’s empty, I’m tired. If it’s full of items that are not ice cubes, I have abandoned domestic economy (temporarily, at least) and cannot be asked to do anything out of the way. That’s the freezer test. The refrigerator test, which is much easier, calls for a bottle of good Champagne. I’d fail that just now, but only because there is no room for a bottle of Champagne. This isn’t because the icebox is stuffed with incipient garbage. It’s because I’ve arranged things in neat bins that don’t allow for the deposit of a bottle of beer, much less something bigger.

We’re going to have the quiche for dinner, on trays, while we watch Rubicon and Mad Men. Comfort food! In contrast to which, the salmon-trout salad sparked a conversation that kept us at the table for an hour and a half. We talked about Mary (as in “BVM”), Augustine, and why college is so expensive these days, and a bunch of other things. When Kathleen left the table (to run an errand), I thought how odd and peculiar and absolutely wonderful it is that we two old married folks (29 years this October) can still have the kind of animated dinner-table conversation that two people have when (as it seems) they’re finding one another to be very interesting conversation partners but when (in fact) they’re also falling in love.

Over the weekend, I said to Kathleen that I think that this summer, this summer of 2010, is the point from which we’re going to date the beginning of a very bad economic time, something at least as bad as the Great Depression of the 1930s. The crickets have stopped assuring us that this would/will never happen again, which corresponds at last to what we’ve been seeing right in front of our eyes.

I’d like to think that, having stopped worrying that it’s coming, we’ll do something about making it not so bad. But what? What can one do? I can’t even find the old entries that scolded Barack Obama for not speaking up against the ethnic cleansing of New Orleans after Katrina. I know that I made a few; I also know that I muffled them a bit, kept them as low-key as I could without completely castrating my point. Mr Courage, eh? That was the most that I could do — words! I complained that Barack Obama was a savvy politician who would pick his fights shrewdly. Now, of course, I only wish that that were true. If he’s picking his fights shrewdly at the moment, then he must be so savvy that nobody else has the faintest idea what we’re in for. And perhaps we don’t.

“Structural unemployment.” Philip Greenspun wonders if today’s unemployed human beings aren’t the “structural equivalents” of the Nineteenth Century’s draft horses. Now, there’s an idea that will warm Middle America’s heart toward the élite! Have a look at something that I wrote in 2006, in response to a brief article in Foreign Affairs by Alan Blinder. What good did that do, my prescience about the outsourced economy? The structurally superfluous economy.

When I was young, the battle cry was “Don’t trust anyone over thirty!” It would be music to my ears to hear that now. Nobody over forty has a single good idea. (Except for me, of course; and what I’ve really got is a lack of bad ideas — I hope and pray! Oh, and my friend Joe Jervis.) Let me know if you encounter an exception.

1. Friday night: Mozart Mozart at Lincoln Center. A smashingly good concert, which is all the more super because I chose only two events, and this was the only Avery Fisher night, the only “normal concert.” (Next week’s Emerson String Quartet recital at Alice Tully ought to be great as well, but I’ll always associate Mostly Mozart with Philharmonic Hall, as it was during the first season — when, as I recall, you could be a sort of book of chits, convertible into tickets at your pleasure during the Festival.

The concert began with Così fan tutte and ended with Don Giovanni. Well, you’ll see what I mean. I don’t know when I last heard the Così overture by itself. It’s a jolly, but rather brainless piece, repeating its two very simple themes over and over; as such, it’s perfect for the opera that follows, which is about very silly young people who don’t really notice much of anything. As a rule, I disapprove of playing opera overtures by themselves (Rossini’s excepted), but this one is a very old friend, and of course it does the job of warming up the orchestra very nicely.

Mozart’s 22nd Piano Concerto was the last of the great ones that I got to know. It’s big (plenty of trumpets and drums), but its middle movement is ruminative rather than tuneful, the very opposite of the previous concerto’s. The pianist was David Fray, who, unlike our conductor (see below) looks rather younger than his 29 years. He is an excellent pianist, with very fine ideas about the balance of Mozart’s compositional blocks, but I should like to hear a few recordings, because, in person, M Fray is a romantic poet, given to raptures and collapses. You’d never know it, but his fingers have a wicked sense of humor, and when I read the review in the Times I agreed with James Oestreich that he ought to write his own cadenzas — one just feels that they’d be interesting. (Edwin Fischer’s were played; I knew the concluding one, but I’d never heard the first movement’s.)

Lionel Bringuier is one of those men who look totally grown up when they’re fifteen. He’s twenty-three now, but he could pass for a youthful forty. I don’t mean to say that he looks old. He just looks fully formed, set. And he conducts like someone three times his age. His way with the Andante of the Prague Symphony was extraordinarily controlled but also, well, wise. I want to say “organic,” because it wasn’t at all mechanical. The music was regular in the way that breathing is regular. The orchestra respired, between passion and sweetness, in and out, with no jerking shifts of tone. It was the most natural thing in the world — and very beautiful. If you can make the Prague Symphony sound fresh at any age, you’re a genius. The outer movements were grand, too, with the introductory Adagio and the entire Presto finale deeply infused with Don Giovanni, the opera that Mozart wrote at about the same time. (Indeed, he wrote it for Prague, along with the Prague Symphony, because the music lovers of that town responded so much more favorably to Le Nozze di Figaro a year or so earlier.)

The fountain at Lincoln Center — I must write about that separately. I feel rather stupid, since it’s got to be at the top of anybody’s must-see list, and here I thought it was just a fountain. It was redone, when? Last year? And is now a computerized marvel cum water cannon. I can’t wait for Will to be old enough to join the children runnng back and forth, shrieking in joyous terror.

2. Saturday night: Deep-Fat Fryer Disaster, narrowly averted. I haven’t had the big DeLonghi deep-fat fryer out in a while, what with &c &c. Having experimented with every known oil, and combination of oil and lard, I’ve come to realize at last that, whatever else, Crisco doesn’t stink up the apartment. The problem is that it’s solid. Which is not a problem, except that you know what happens when you power electric heating elements that aren’t immersed in liquid. If it’s one of those little numbers that boils water in a mug, it’s not so bad; if it’s a DeLonghi deep fryer, you’re talking expensive replacement. I had the bright idea (o tremble!) of placing the frying tub, which can be lifted out of the insulating frame, on a low burner, and melting the Crisco that way. But, oh, why was it taking so much Crisco to cover the heating element? The answer to this question occurred to me in the nick of time. I’d left the little drain tap open, and the oil had just about filled the well of my stovetop, without reaching the burners or flooding the sparkplugs that ignite the gas.

Ladling the melted Crisco from the stovetop — which is basically a one-piece enamel basin, thank heaven — was tedious but not impossible, and it only felt as though it would take forever. When the level dropped below ladling range, I sopped up the remainder with paper towels, and then cleaned the basin with ammonia. All better!  But the French fries that I made for dinner weren’t very good; in the slight confusion of aftershock, I’d put the lid on the fryer while the potatoes were cooking, not a good idea.

If the disaster had to happen, Saturday night was the night. I was in a good mood, not too tired, and equipped, it turned out, to deal with the near catastrophe without raising either my voice or my arms. I’d say that it delayed dinner by no more than twenty-five minutes.

3. Sunday afternoon: Brunch at Orsay. The French fries were better, but not that much better. The croque monsieur was delicious, however. It was good to see our friends, a Brearley classmate of Kathleen’s and her husband.

Question that I keep forgetting to ask: is that what Mortimer’s looked like, or did they do the place over when it became Orsay? By the way, the banquettes have been removed from the larger dining room (the one without the bar). They probably did that months ago; it’s possible that I haven’t been to Orsay since we had brunch with the same couple last summer.

After brunch, we walked our friends toward their apartment, on our way to Gracious Home, where I picked up a brochure for an “ironing system” that costs $2500. You get the ironing board, the iron (which stores in a compartment) and even a tank of water. The whole thing folds up to a thickness barely deeper than the ironing board that I’ve got (also from Gracious Home, but a lot cheaper). Question: what’s the market for a $2500 iron & board? Even on the Upper East Side of Manhattan — who’s ironing?)

4. Sunday evening: Rubicon and Mad Men. When I got back from Gracious Home, I was too hot to do anything but shower and read. (See below.) As dinnertime approached, Kathleen suggested that we go out, and that sounded just fine to me. It was only at 8:30 that we woke up to the impossibility of going out, unless we wanted to miss Rubicon. So we called Gracie’s Corner for a burger and a grilled cheese sandwich, and we finished dinner just in time to turn on the Bravia. (This entails turning on the cable box as well; it must shut itself off after a day or so.)

Rubicon is a fairly dumb show with a great cast. I wonder if I’ve seen Dallas Roberts on the stage? I haven’t seen any of the movies listed at IMDb; nor, of course, have I seen the actor’s television shows. But Kathleen and I are both certain that we’ve seen him before.

Mad Men was good: lots of Don and lots of Joan — and no Betty. We really liked the goof-up on Lane’s flower orders, and we loved it when Joan fired the careless secretary who was responsible. More Peggy would have been great.

5. Every spare minute: Jennifer Egan’s Look At Me. I’ll have more to say about this masterpiece when I’ve knocked off Ms Egan’s first two books, The Emerald City and The Invisible Circus. Or at least I hope that I will; where I’ll find the time to write a comprehensive view of this amazing writer’s fiction I’ve no idea. Jennifer Egan is the only writer whom I would class with Jonathan Franzen: they can deploy technique in interesting, almost experimental ways that never, however, interfere with narrative thrust or threaten to degenerate into solipsistic moaning. (When he gets older, I may include Joshua Ferris in this small, expert group.)

In 2002, a year after Look At Me came out, Jennifer Egan appended an afterword to make it clear that her book was imagined in the “more innocent time” prior to 9/11. I think that she owes us another postscript, this time disavowing clairvoyant knowledge of Facebook. Uncanny!

I’ve headed this entry with the French word for “exhausted” because, given that it’s French, I suppose, and therefore a term that I have to think about, however fleetingly, it actually means “used up” to me. “Exhausted” means used up, too, technically, but its strong everyday meaning is just another word for “tired.” I’m not just tired, though; I’m used up, physically, and I’ve been running a sort of temporal deficit for two or three months now. There haven’t been enough hours to do everything that I’ve signed up to do. In a red-alert, heart-attack sense, as distinguished from the familiar too-many-books-too-little-time complaint.

Something was going to have to go, and it kills me to say that what’s going to go is my Thursdays with Will. Megan will be returning to work full-time-at-the-office next month, and Will will spend Thursdays just as he spends the other weekdays, at his coolisssimo day care in SoHo. I have promised myself that Thursdays will be repitched to the upkeep of Civil Pleasures, which site I have totally neglected these past two weeks. I have to work up a template for new pages before I continue posting there, and I can only hope that I’ll be able to design it before September.

But I’d rather go on running the temporal deficit. Except that I couldn’t. I’d be either a dishonest or a lousy grandparent if I said that helping to take care of a small child for even just one day a week is a breeze; it’s not. But although Will might tire me out, he doesn’t use me up; what uses me up is the shortage of sheer blank hours to do what I want to do here. If my Thursdays with Will were to continue, I now understand, I’ have to ratchet back my expectations for these sites of mine. Which I would do willingly. What’s more important, reviewing the Book Review or taking Will for a walk? What has bothered me most in the past couple of weeks is knowing that, even if I gave up the Book Review review, I’d still find it difficult to get round to writing about that walk with Will.

For the first time in ages, I got to the end of this week without having written my review of the Book Review. I toyed with the idea of abandoning the feature; it has taught me what I needed to learn. I’ve developed a clear understanding of what the Book Review ought to be, along with a rather dispiriting conviction that this ideal Book Review is never going to be published by The New York Times. But who knows? I’ve decided to keep my hand in, but on far less demanding terms. I’ll write about the good reviews and the awful reviews, and mark the reviews that don’t belong in the Book Review in the first place with silence. Truth to tell, I’m tired of reading the Book Review — it’s so utterly mediocre. (The worst weeks are the ones when Liesl Schillinger, my great hope for literary understanding at the Book Review, turns in something that’s not up to her own standards. Such lapses are inevitable; I oughtn’t to have to count on one gifted reviewer. No, the worst is when Walter Kirn plays it safe and pretends not to understand a genuinely edgy book. )

I’ll close this housekeeping entry (which I haven’t dared to present as such, preferring to masquerade as a diarist) with two notes. First, I want to write about yesterday’s walk up and down 86th Street with Will. And about this evenings top-notch Mostly Mozart concert at Avery Fisher Hall. Second, I want you to know that I love compiling the Daily Office. The more I do it, the sharper my sense of what it ought to be like becomes — and the more difficult to find suitable pages to link to. If I’m used up, it’s in no small part because I glance throught three to six hundred feeds a day, reading about twenty long ones from beginning to end. Most of what I read, obviously, never appears here. You’d think, though, that it would be easy to harvest eight good links a day from such a mass of input. But it’s hard, and it gets harder. And I love what I do.

Which is another good reason for complaining in a foreign language.

The Wednesday circuit goes like this: I begin by walking to Crawford Doyle, on Madison between 81st and 82nd. Then I walk down 81st Street to Willy’s, my barbershop. Trim and spruce, I head for the Hi-Life, which used to be at 72nd and First but which has moved to Second Avenue between 78th and 79th. (Here be excellent club sandwiches.) After lunch, I creep along 78th or 79th Street, depending on the temperature and the need for shade, to Agata & Valentina, at 78th and First, to shop for Thursday night’s dinner. Bags in hand, I head up first, more often than not stopping at Morning Calm Gallery, and, today, paying a rare visit to Yorkshire Wines and Spirits (I usually phone in), with a final stop at Gristede’s.Today, tThe circuit took a bit more than two and a half hours to run. That’s about as quick as I can be.

I make it sound like an immemorial routine, but it dates no further back than May of this year. I’ve been making each of the Wednesday circuit  for years — decades, in some cases — but I’ve never chained them together in a regular row. The comfortable sense that I’ve been doing this for years is offset by the knowledge that I haven’t been doing it for years, not at all; I try not to feel too stupid. But when it hits me that I’m 62, I wonder, with finger-tapping impatience, just what it is, exactly, that I’ve been doing for most of that time. How could it have taken so long to figure out the simplest everyday rhythms?

In lieu of speculative answers to that question, let me just say that I’m deep into Look At Me, Jennifer Egan’s last novel but one (two?). Crawford Doyle didn’t have it in stock, but Dot McClearey was happy to order it for me. I could, of course, have ordered it from Amazon. (And you might think that I could have found it at the big Barnes & Noble down the street, but no — they had nothing but The Keep. It’s my settled conviction that, for all his moolah and whatever, Leonard Riggio does not really know how to operate a bookstore.) But nobody at Amazon is going to ask me, as Dot does, what I’ve been reading and thinking — much less actually listen to my answer.

The great thing about the Wednesday circuit is that it lets everybody know when I’m going to show up.

Never have I felt quite so foolish as I do now, waiting for someone young to take over. But that’s the only hope left.

The prospect of a GOP recapture of both houses of Congress in November is not only depressing but unreasonable: Republicans have done nothing (absolutely nothing) to earn voter support. The midterm election will be a windfall for them because there is no one else to benefit from electoral reproach of the Democratic Party. And, indeed, the Democratic Party deserves that reproach. Even if Congressional Democrats had done their best, the White House’s leadership failures alone would signal the need for a regime change. Whatever the shortcomings of the men and women who hold office, the problem of the Democratic Party is embedded in the class of advisers that its elected officials listen to, the Axelrods and the Summerses, the Emanuels and the Holbrookes, not to mention anyone and everyone who has ever advised the Clintons. Democratic advisers are largely indistinguishable from their Republican counterparts; they certainly share the conservatives’ contempt for John Q Public. They’re largely conservative themselves, made so by their terror of being mistaken for “socialists.” They may have a few genuinely liberal objectives, but a difference in programs does not amount to a political difference. Those liberal ideas simply make Democrats look less disciplined and organized than Republicans. If there is one thing that Republicans know how to do, it is singing Americans to sleep every night — in close harmony, if necessary. When Democrats tuck us in, they hand us a teacher evaluation form and remind us of their record. We don’t sleep so well under the Democrats.

And we never will. This is not the place to lay out my thesis that the Democratic Party destroyed itself — heroically, like a soldier throwing himself on a live grenade — in the Sixties fight for civil rights, but perhaps it will suffice to remind younger readers that, until that campaign, Southern whites and Yankee labor constituted the backbone of the Party. Neither of those constituencies remains in the Democratic camp today. The Nixonian “Southern Strategy” took care of Dixie; globalization finished off the industrial unions. Back in the Fifties, the kind of man whom Clint Eastwood portrays in movie after movie was a Democrat. Since the Sixties? Not so much.

So who are the Democrats? They’re people who ought to have formed a new party forty-odd years ago, but who didn’t, because they hardly knew who they were. “Liberated” working women. Opponents of American imperialism. Immigrants. And — of course — those former Republicans who happened to be black, as most blacks happened to be. The Democratic Party, beginning in the Seventies, was the party of the formerly marginalized. From such an organization we expected leadership? Such leadership as the Democratic Party has offered, since the days of Lyndon Johnson, has been rented from men with no personal stakes in the party’s projects, men whose lofty and somewhat gratuitous ambition to do good has increasingly alienated ordinary Americans.

The world has turned a good deal: the children of the formerly marginalized are not themselves marginalized. Barack Obama may be a black American, but there is nothing marginalized about him; he springs from the heart of the meritocracy that runs the United States. Runs the country — but does not, can not, lead it. For leadership, we must hope for visionaries who may not necessarily have tested well or shown the impressive organizational acumen that’s required to get to the top of the heap today. We must hope for someone smart and capable who is also graced, not so much by ideals of what we might become as by understanding of what we are and what we’re capable of right now.

This leader whom I’m hoping for must be young for another reason: the capabilities of information technology must be an open book. He or she must see the world through its capabilities, instead of trying to harness them to serve the world as it is. Almost every institution that flourished in the age of the modern nation state has suffered massive blows, and almost none deserve to be saved or salvaged. I say this not because I welcome, with immature recklessness, the excitement of social chaos. It’s for precisely the opposite reason that I call upon the young to see what can be made of still abundant resources, human and material, in the development of new institutions. I pray for smooth transitions. I know that no one my age is competent to imagine them.

I’m hoping for an old soul in a young frame.

Today, on my Wednesday errands — a routine that has only recently emerged from the cloud of dust and gas that I’ve been living in since I decided, last October, that I really must put my house in order and keep it there — I stopped in at Crawford Doyle, my neighborhood bookshop. I’m making a point of buying new titles there whenever possible, and today I was after the new Gary Shteyngart. I hadn’t planned to read Super Sad True Love Story; in fact, I had planned not to read it. But I decided to buy the book all the same, as a gesture of support for an author who graces Manhattan’s literary scene with a bubbly naughtiness that I find delightful, even if he writes with a brush that’s a tad broad for my taste. Crawford Doyle had a small stack of Super Sads. What it did not have was any books by Jennifer Egan other than her new hit, A Visit From the Goon Squad, which I’ve got two copies of, having bought the one that I read at right there, at Crawford Doyle, and having bought another for the author to sign at Barnes & Noble. So I asked Dot McCleary to order a copy of Look at Me, and while we were doing that I spied an appealing little book on the counter — little books are always appealing, but this one was by Jenny Diski, so of course I had to have it. Dot thanked me for that; I was sparing her the effort of reshelving it.

The first thing that I do when the London Review of Books arrives is scan the contents for Jenny Diski’s byline. I’m a huge fan. She always makes me laugh, because she’s impatient with importance but charming in exasperation. In the book that I picked up, there are slightly rueful hints that this outlook has given her an unexpected sympathy for the elders whose prim caution she so detested when she was a teenager, in the Sixties. That’s the title of her little book, The Sixties.

The easy availability of social security and the dole are a forgotten but vital factor during the whole of the Sixties, and well into the Seventies. Unconsciously, as it might have been, the welfare system that the newly elected government brought in after the war in order to ensure a fair and just society was also the way in which the older generation were to indulge their post-war children. The Forties turned into the Fifties, the Fifties became the Sixties, and the Sixties seemed to go on forever, but even then, as the old ones gnashed their teeth and tore out their hair at the goings-on of their wild, rebellious young, they continued to pay them a state stipend, unemployment benefit, or a generous student grant, underwriting, as it were, their worst fears.

You have to be something of a curmudgeon to see that. You have to have come to grips with the fact of Thatcher and Reagan in order to understand that gnashing and tearing. At the time, nobody under 30 would or could have bothered to connect the dots.

***

It was in the late Sixties — on a particular day in 1967, I should think — that I first felt the chill of time’s inexorable passage. I was too old, I realized, too old ever to be invited to serve as an escort at a debutante party. There would be no going back, no new cycle of pre-deb dances leading to the real, white-tie deal. This was very bad news indeed, because I was just learning how much I liked escorting girls to debutante balls. I liked the dressing up, and the playing at being grown-up (the drinking, the driving, the smoking). Lust had nothing to do with it, which kept things clear and pleasant, especially since the girls were usually more than a little interested in the other escort. I had crushes on girls, but I was unusually immature, far from developed sexually. I had a nine year-old’s horror of sex well into my college career. (That changed quite suddenly.) I know that this backwardness is unusual, but I wonder how unusual it is; when I think of the Sixties, I resent having grown up in such a rank, libidinous climate. I was a romantic in those days. I liked holding girls tight when we danced the denatured fox-trot of the day, but I liked to move. I liked to cross the floor without appearing to look where I was going, all the while keeping up a stream of talk that, when I was lucky, elicited real laughter from my partner. Fox trots, denatured or not, were on the way out throughout the Sixties: the world that I thought I preferred — the world that I liked the look of, without understanding what it cost — was in a recessional from the moment I realized that I’d miss it.

***

I remember reading Ellen Willis, writing about rock in 1970 or so, in The New Yorker, and pronouncing it dead. Dead? I wondered. But it just got started. She was right, though, and what was dead was specifically what I had disliked about rock: its terrible manners. I gave terrible manners a try in the late Sixties — this would be after the sex change — but the shame of it nearly killed me. I don’t have the body for bad manners; my good manners are all that keep me from seeming overbearingly oafish and self-involved (and of course I’m not entirely sure that they do).

What it came down to was not having the body for youth. I wasn’t cut out for it at all. My childhood was a physical misery from beginning to end, even though nobody mistreated me and I was in fact indulged as a matter of course. Still, I was existentrially itchy until about the age of fifteen. Being comfortable in my own skin (and I’m never quite sure that this has happened, either) was unknown to me until I was nearly sixty. I’m not inclined to look back with nostalgia.

So I’m reading about the Sixties only because I know that Jenny Diski is going to make them far more entertaining on the page than they were in real life.

You really couldn’t be seen wearing a skirt that was a couple of inches too long. It made you feel wretched. On a camping holiday in Assisi I was persuaded to be sensible and to lower my hem two inches, still short enough for me to be refused entry to the Basilica of St Francis, and felt for the entire two weeks like an old woman shuffling about in widows weeds. As far as I was concerned, only a properly minuscule skirt could distinguish me from the nuns queuing up to see the Grotto.

Whereas, as far I was concerned, a woman was never so beautiful as when her skirt bloomed out and grazed the floor. That hasn’t changed.

New slipcovers arrived today, and were fitted on the pair of love seats that belonged to Kathleen’s grandmother. I had the idea, which Kathleen (and Quatorze) went right along with, of not covering the love seats as a pair. So the sofa under the window is covered in the Elsie de Wolfe fern-patterned linen that The Aesthete wrote up several months ago, while the love seat with its back to the door is covered in a thick, almost quilted mint green cotton, with pink piping.  The linen slipcover fits its love seat like a glove, but the chintzy cotton is bulky and non-conforming, too tight here and too loose there — obviously a slipcover. As Quatorze put it, we’ve got a Newport/Palm Beach situation going.

When the man from the upholsterer was through, Quatorze and I went out for lunch, and then I went to the barbershop for a trim. I had planned to walk over to Agata & Valentina afterward, but it was so hot and humid when I stepped out of the barber shop that the next stop had to be home. In the evening, after a Chinese dinner from Wa Jeal (Wu Liang Ye that was), Ms NOLA and I walked over to Carl Shurz Park, where The New Yorker and Penguin Books were showing Little Miss Sunshine. There was a strong breeze by the river, and it didn’t seem particularly hot or humid, but the three-block walk home left me near to soaking. We watched about half an hour of the wonderful film; tumblers of white wine on the rocks at dinner meant that I couldn’t do without plumbing for very long.

In the Times this morning, I read that Apple has sold more than three million iPads. The figure is strangely weightless, like how old Will is, or, for the matter of that, how old the iPad is. Will is nearly seven months old, which seems like a lot most of the time but which often seems ridiculously too-short, as if life only seven months ago, without Will, were reclaimable. Life without Will is as departed and gone as it would be if he were my age. Similarly: life without the iPad. I can think of nothing that has ever changed my every day life with anything like the speed of the iPad. So, the fact that 3.3 million iPads are out there seems like a lot, for about a nanosecond. 3.3 million is about 1% of this country’s population; it’s vanishingly small in terms of the world’s. The main thing is, though, that I’m ready. Ready for there to be thirty or three hundred million iPads.

Or so I tell myself.

The funny thing about the new slipcovers is that they make the living room look the way it used to look, long ago — long long ago, before we actually lived here, it must be: the for the living room has never like this during our tenancy. But it looks like it has looked like this before. It most certainly does not look new.

Which may explain why it no longer seems quite so desperately important to repaint the room, or to replace the draperies. The usual consequence of putting something new in a room is to make the stuff that was already there look worn and dowdy. Not so this time. It’s as though the new slipcovers arrived in some prewashed, well-worn condition.

I don’t think that we had any conscious of plan of reviving a room that we remembered from the past. But that is the effect, at least for me. I feel, sitting in here this evening, that something has been restored.

Ms NOLA and I went to see Io sono l’amore (I Am Love) on Friday afternoon, and the movie stuck with me overnight and well into yesterday. I’m going to have to see it a few more times before I can speak intelligently about it, because it’s a High Italian work of art. By that I mean that its style is that of big, painterly canvases. It is not quite the glossy spectacular that the trailer and the news images suggested, but it is as distinctly and pervasively styled as a movie by, say, David Lynch.

It reminded me of the big mid-century Italian classics, by Visconti, Pasolini, and even Antonioni. Like an early Antonioni movie — Le amiche, say — the story was intelligible enough without being altogether straightforward. There was none of the grand mystification of the wonderful Monica Vitti movies — mystification that, if we’re honest, looks a lot like psychopathology now. (Shouldn’t she be on medication?) I was telling Ms NOLA about L’Eclisse; about how fascinated I was, watching the film for the first time in college, by the existential malaise of the breaking-up lovers at the start of the movie. They’re in perfect health, and they don’t have any money worries, and yet they’re wretched. I was green with envy! I wouldn’t have minded being wretched as I was, as an undergraduate, if only I could have been spared my fiscal woes (my allowance was never remotely adequate — I had a library to build!) and my anxieties about classes (which I more than once failed simply by not showing up for the exam). I accepted being a mess; L’Eclisse showed me that it was possible to be a very stylish mess. This is also a lesson of I Am Love.  

In the event, however, I stopped being a mess when I stopped having to worry about money and grades. I have no aptitude for angst. Not hearing from Kathleen when she’s traveling can send me to the inner circles of hell, but the agony vanishes without a trace the moment I hear her ring. And I no longer allow worries to fester. If something’s bothering me, I do what I can do to make it stop. This usually involves placing a call to Kathleen. (I need a new dentist, though.)

Luca Guadagnino, the writer/director of I Am Love, really knows what he’s doing. I’ve rarely tasted the irony-infused satisfaction that was sparked by watching an unwitting footman carry dishes of fish soup to a dinner table, knowing as I did that the principal ingredient of the broth was Disaster, and that it wouldn’t even have to be tasted to work its poison. Really, the moment was right up there with Dante and Boccaccio.  

Now that my grandson can sit up and play with things, he’s got to solve a lot of physics problems, and it isn’t always fun. I watch him with the keenest interest, as he waves a wooden spoon, then tries to grab a snall piece of kitchen equipment that invariably darts farther from him each time he reaches for it.

There are many things to do with the items in Will’s homely colander, and it’s no wonder that every now and then he surrenders to the misery of being overwhelmed. When he cries, what usually works is hunkering down next to him to rearrange his stuff, as a kind of reset. Eventually, though, this doesn’t work, and Will has to be picked up and comforted and carried off to some other place.

Perhaps it’s simply that he wants a playmate. That’s something that the grandparents of bright children are apt to overlook. We think of Will as a self-sustaining genius. In fact, he’s far more sociable than we ever were.

Rest assured, though: we never let Will “cry it out.” We’re there, picking him up and asking what’s wrong, even though we know that he can’t tell us. The idea of charging a child who’s incapable of the most rudimentary self-expression with responsibility for his unhappiness strikes us as a deep barbarity. Equally barbarous is to think in terms of Will’s taking advantage of our sympathy.

About the physics lessons, I ask you to conduct the following experiment. Next time you cross a street, try to figure out how far from the kerb you can tell which foot will step onto it first. You’ll be surprised how far in advance you know which foot it is, even though you haven’t given the matter the slightest thought. So it is with much of what we do during the day, our brains working as mammoth processors for impalpable operations.

Although he is still an angel, Will has been kicked out of the Garden of Eden. He knows that life doesn’t always arrange itself properly, and he’s not happy about it. We can’t wait to talk to him about it.

In the apartment, it is much cooler than I expect it to be, given the heat and the humidity outside; it’s as though the building’s HVAC system has been upgraded (something that I very much doubt). I’m still a prisoner of the bad weather, unwilling to undertake potentially tedious or obtrusive projects — unwilling, even, to sort through the small pile of debris on one of the wing chairs in the blue room. (Meanwhile, where are all my Teach Yourself language books? And my Nederlands dictionary? These used to be easily to hand, but I tucked them away somewhere in the season of household reform and now they are lost.) But although I’m idle, I’m not uncomfortable. I read and I write. Sometimes there is music; often I don’t get round to turning on the Nano of the moment until the middle of the afternoon. I think.

I think, for example, about David Foster Wallace. In the current NYRB, Wyatt Mason writes an almost implacable defense of the late writer’s prose style. Mason spits on the oft-voiced notion that Wallace was prolix or “unedited.” He does not refute it, however. He claims instead that Wallace is an “avant garde writer.” The comment stings with scolding: we had forgotten about the avant garde, hadn’t we? Is it really still possible to be avant garde? Isn’t that like trying to be baroque?

Much of Mason’s argument didn’t engage me, either because I already agreed with it completely (the critique of television), or because the “problem” of David Foster Wallace is one in which sensibility leaches into pathology.

Although it has been said, in the wake of Wallace’s suicide in 2008, that it would be wrong to read his work through the limiting prism of his death, it would be no less wrong were we to evade acknowledging the centrality of depression, addiction, and isolation as subjects in his work.

They say that people get happier once they’re past their fifties, and my own experience certainly bears this out. It seems to me now that I spent my life, up to the age of forty-five or so, fretting. It seemed so at the time, but now the fretfulness seems less like a response to environmental conditions than a faulty setting. I wonder if, one fine day, Scientists will give it a name, a name to list alongside “depression.” It doesn’t matter anymore, because I have survived the disorder (for the most part; as a “no news is bad news” subscriber, I need to know that my loved ones are safe and sound). I enjoy life as I really never used to do, and it soothes for the ticking awareness that I’m not going to be around forever. Am I suggesting that David Foster Wallace might have outlived his depression? I’m not ruling it out. He took his life at an age of maximal self-censure.

I used to think that I had a lot of bad habits, but now I look at it the other way round: my good habits aren’t quite good enough. I have the habit of writing, yes; but I don’t have the habit of writing hard — of forcing myself to follow implications that aren’t, at the moment, appealing. My habit of reading is faulty: I’m a terrible note taker, always jotting down things that turn out to make no sense later while failing to register the passages that will prove to have stuck in my mind. (This is why I never, never write in books.) My scholarship is labored. I would rather net a phrase of sweet precision than grasp a clear idea.

And I am very slow. I’ve always been slow. It might not seem so, because I resist distraction fairly well (especially now that I’m no longer fretting!), but — where did David Foster Wallace find the time to do everything that he did? When I look at my day, from reveille to taps, I have a hard time finding waste — time that would be better spent doing something else. But there’s not enough of it for the (to me) useful things that I’m doing. It is a limitation that, unlike gravity, I have a hard time accepting.

There is one thing that I waste a lot of time on: deciding what to do next. To put it better: deciding which road to travel. The high road of reading and writing? Or the low road of going through the mail and organizing my desk drawer? I can agonize over whether to create a new Nano playlist. Playlists are tedious to compose, but, perhaps because I composed playlists for a living throughout my twenties (in my radio days, when I was the music director of a classical radio station) — playlists that were printed and mailed out to subscribers; playlists that weren’t supposed to be changed — it’s difficult for me to remember that they’re now — now — so easy to edit. So, in my agonized moments, I dither about whether I really ought take on a project that, in fact, is not nearly as demanding as I make it out to be.

I do a lot of that, now I think of it. I expect things to be more difficult than they turn out to be. I suppose that that is a kind of fretting. And what is fretting, but asking wearisome questions? And what, for the matter of that, is thinking, but asking interesting ones?

 

What with the heat, I’ve nothing to report. I haven’t done anything; I haven’t been anywhere. I did go out today, but I didn’t go far: the HousingWorks branch at 90th and Second and the Barnes & Noble at Lexington and 86th (the destination of my last street-crossing outing, last Thursday) were the far points.

Kathleen had packed three fat bags of donations for HousingWorks, but she had neglected to Fill Out the Form. To be exact, she didn’t know that we had any forms in the house. She had composed comprehensive lists, specific to each bag, but No Form. “If you want a deduction, you have to name a figure,” I told her on the phone, when I was ready to go out but had just noticed the No Form problem. Kathleen named a figure, and I Filled Out the Form. It was duly stamped, and the appropriate yellow copy is sitting with Kathleen’s mail.

After lunch, I went to Barnes & Noble, in search of books by Jennifer Egan. It will come as no surprise to experienced bookshoppers that notwithstanding the acclaim that has greeted A Visit From the Goon Squad, Ms Egan’s new book (have I mentioned this???), B&N’s “Fiction and Literature” shelves proffered but one title, The Keep. As this was secretly the very title that I was looking for, I didn’t complain. What’s hard, though, is having promised not to open The Keep until I have finished The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet — a book that, I’m happy to report, has really picked up in the past thirty pages or so.

I also bought some CDs. All of Mozart’s string quartets, in a $40 box from DG (the Amadeus Quartet — good late-mid-century stuff). An album of dance music from the halcyon days of Louis XIV. I bought this to go with an article about Versailles in the latest issue of L’Express. Poor Quatorze will simply have to sit there as I ladle it out — did he know about the Musée Lambinet? Can he bear to listen to another cut of Lully? Competitive Versaillesomanie is not a pretty sport, especially when expensive teacups are involved. I don’t gloat; Q’s revenge can be fearsome.

Buying CDs in a store — now that’s a novelty. I’m serious! It has been so long since it occurred to me to do such a thing that I’m ready to write a mash note to the management: what a neat idea, this selling of CDs! It would be utterly pathetic if the odd jewel didn’t turn up. My heart just about stopped when I saw that Keith Jarrett’s recording of (some of) Handel’s keyboard suites is still on the market! I bought my first copy nearly fifteen years ago, at a Borders in Portland, Maine. It is one of the best recordings that I have ever heard, clearing any top-ten list that you can devise. I’m amazed because what makes the recording great is its fantastic taste: Mr Jarrett plays with a scrupulous virtuosity that puts everyone else in this repertoire to shame. Is that why the CD is still out there? It seems too much to hope for.

Here’s why I really braved the scorching heat (but I do exaggerate) to venture all the way to Lexington Avenue: I wanted to see how our local branch of the Shake Shack is coming along. And it is coming along! Whether they’ll be open by the end of the month (some reports) or the end of the summer (per lettering on the window), it won’t be long before I can put on an extra fifty pounds with the Danny Meyer Gutbomb Diet. Yumm!

Although I don’t believe in parking children in front of the TV, or imprisoning them in some sort of rolling toychest, it’s always wonderful to see a child playing by itself, wrapped up in things — and the homelier the things, the better. Megan had the idea last week of assembling a batch of safe found objects in a colander, and I did the same thing this week.

For forty-five minutes, Will examined, chewed on, and banged the following miscellany of items: a shortish but venerable wooden spoon; a mushroom brush, and a brush for combing silk from ears of corn; a knob of brain coral; an empty jelly jar with its lid; a crystal kniferest, in the shape of a barbell, that had never been used for any purpose until yesterday; and a 2/3 cup measure. Scratch the measure: I’d needed the night before to make a vinaigrette, and I hadn’t put it back. In the past couple of weeks, Will’s ability to sit upright for as long as he wants to has firmed up nicely, but there were a few tumbles, all suffered in good humor, brought on by some very basic physics lessons. The lidded jar was at first too large to deal with, and occasioned some frustration; Will was not about to allocate both hands to handling it. Eventually, though, he managed to sweep it into his arm. It was his favorite thing.

In the afternoon, Will found the these rudimentary toys too boring to contemplate. Done that! After a bit of mild fussing and whimpering, I took him out onto the balcony, where we’ve stuffed a garden chair with pillows, so that he can lean into the back of the chair and survey our patch of Yorkville and beyond. Sometimes, his gaze is fixed on the ironwork of the chair, which he grips with the firmness of a racing driver, but yesterday it was very clear that he was watching the traffic on 86th Street. What else to do in this weather?

Later in the day, I prepped dinner, setting the table, shucking corn, seasoning the steak, and popping some vegetables into the oven — and then I went out. I walked up the street to the new (consolidated) Barnes & Noble at Lexington Avenue, descended to the Events space, and attended a reading. I mean to do this sort of thing all the time, but I forget, or I feel too busy at home — the usual excuses. But I really wanted to see Jennifer Egan, and I wanted a signed copy of her great new book, A Visit From the Goon Squad. Announcing that this was the last reading of her tour (what a relief that must be!), Ms Egan told us that she had decided to read from a chapter that she hadn’t read from before: “A to B.” This is the more or less conventional social comedy cut from a book that the author describes as a record album, and it was great fun to listen to. Afterward, I surprised myself by asking the kind of question that an author would like to be asked (“Can you tell us something about the PowerPoint chapter?”) and was thanked for doing so when I got my signature.

I was home within seventy-five minutes of leaving, but the reading injected a strong second current into my thoughts during dinner, one that I couldn’t share with my family, both about the book (A Visit From the Goon Squad is a grave book) and about the literary life, such as I’ve glimpsed it. I wasn’t entirely distracted, however. At the end of dinner, Will took to slapping the table, and I took to echoing him. He did not think that this was silly, but he did not find it irritating, either. I wish that I could describe the look of sizing-up that he gave me throughout our impromptu game. But I probably don’t have to.

Hats off! To Steve Laico, of Searchlight Consulting, for all the fantastic work that he has put into making The Daily Blague / reader look as good as it does. Armed as he is with the patience of ten saints, there isn’t anything that Steve can’t do.

As with any renovation, there is a lot of dust left to settle. A creature of routine, I haven’t mastered the new one, and I forget tasks left and right. More than that, my attention is so flattened by stepping over the new construction that I don’t notice anything interesting; I’m just trying to keep my balance. It’s a dull season outside of my head as well. The big excitement this week has been worrying about a power outage: the very opposite of inspiring.

One thing that I’m trying to get used to is the dismal fug that I wake up to most mornings. Having stayed up reading RSS feeds, I’m primed with news, most of it not good. How are we ever going to work our way out of this mess, I ask myself, knowing that the only hopeful answer involves a combination of luck and inertia. This has worked well for humanity over the centuries: the idea is that the inertia keeps anything from happening until the luck sails in. Which, however, it doesn’t always do.

Here’s a tidbit for the Luddites in the audience: I’m well-informed about the bad news of the world because the iPad makes it so easy to read the Internet. I used to skim through feeds — when I didn’t simply bunch hundreds of them together and “mark as read.” If it weren’t for the iPad, I’d be a happier man.

No, I don’t believe it, either.

What’s the word for it? The word for this “new science” that’s everywhere on the Internet: can we do better than “new”?

In the old days, I’d rack my brains, trying to think of a handy term that just might catch on. But I haven’t got the gift for it. I don’t have much faith in the things that I make up — it’s as if I knew better. I believe in the connections that I make between things, in the web of references and corroborations that has assembled itself, galaxy-like, in my brain. But I don’t put much stock in my own inventions, not, at least, where words are concerned.

In a recurring nightmare from which I invariably awaken in a state of sharp discomfort, I am reading a book. As I am reading the book, it occurs to me that I am also writing the book, and as this impression deepens the words  become paler and paler on the page, fading eventually into invisibility. I try to read them but cannot. I try to read, but since I am writing, or supposed to be writing, there is nothing there to be read.

It took me years to grasp one of the things that this dream was telling me: that I would never write fiction.

Anyway: the “new science.” It’s all about “cognition,” which is the new word for “epistemology.” They’re not perfect synonyms, of course. Cognition is the material, almost mechanical, study of how sensation becomes perception. Epistemology, in contrast, has a metaphysical ring to it, suggesting theories of how we know things in spite of our sensations. For example: how do we know about God? The new science is agnostic at best on that subject.

It turns out that almost everything that we thought that we knew about our minds is rubbish. Out with it! It’s not even interesting rubbish — it’s not fertile with new possibilities, as all good rubbish is. It’s just, frankly, the sort of tripe that you get when you decide to think about big issues while seated in a comfortable chair with a snifter of cognac. “Just so.” “Armchair.” Take the foundational piece of crap: “Man is a rational animal.” What a desperate bluff that is! No matter, though: it’s not in the least bit worth arguing with. Into the tip with it.

A fine place to begin studying the irrationality of man is Kathryn Schulz’s zesty and cogent treatise, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error. We will be much better off when everyone has read this book. I wouldn’t mind affixing one of those warranty panes at the entry to my sites, asking potential visitors to “agree” to or “decline” an understanding of Ms Schulz’s findings. First, though, I’d have to distill some a declaration or manifesto from Being Wrong’s lively collection of anecdotes. Take Chapter 11, for example, “Denial and Acceptance.” Much of this chapter is taken up with the aftermath of the rape of a Wisconsin woman, Penny Beerntsen. Beerntsen was gently but firmly railroaded into identifying the wrong man, Steven Avery, as her assailant; years later, she would ask for his forgiveness. She would also have to come to grips with the seductive fallibility of a bad human habit called “confirmation bias.”

At the trial, sixteen separate witnesses had testified that Avery had been at work on the day of the rape, but Penny dismissed their stories as too similar to each other to be believable — an outstanding example of interpreting the evidence against your theory as evidence for your theory instead.

And that’s just one nugget. The red meat of the chapter is the stuff about bull-headed prosecutors who invest too much self-worth in their decisions to admit that they’ve been mistaken. But what’s the word for that? While you’re at it, work up a catchy label for “interpreting the evidence against your theory as evidence for your theory.”

It’s not that the misguided behavior parading through Being Wrong is anything new. (The late, great character actor J T Walsh built a career out of impersonating deluded men who knew they were right.) What’s new is Kathryn Schulz’s conviction that being wrong is such a common state of affairs that we might as well learn a few things about it, instead of pushing it away, as Thomas Aquinas did, as abhorrently abnormal. Ms Schulz proposes that we stop treating error as defect, and begin to understand it as the inevitable byproduct of otherwise healthy and necessary psychological functions. It’s admirably humble to be able to admit that we’ve been wrong about something; Being Wrong shows us how much more pleasant and relaxed life would be if we desensitized ourselves to the bitterness of having failed to get something right.

Being wrong about something isn’t great. Kathryn Schulz isn’t proposing that aeronautic engineers adopt a more relaxed attitude toward the exactness of their calculations. Her target is “the experience of being wrong.” For too many people, this experience is unacceptably painful, to be avoided at all costs no matter how wrong they’ve been. The attempt to avoid the experience of being wrong has a fearful tendency to compound the original, underlying error with even bigger mistakes. It is one thing to identify the wrong man in a lineup. It is a much worse thing to stick with that misidentification, in the teeth of mounting evidence to the contrary, simply to protect (as we all unconsciously do) the roots of our vanity from the acid of error — at the cost of sending the wrong man to prison.

Is there a term for that?

The term that I’m really looking for would cover the stacks of findings, studies, and fMRI analyses that have piled up in the past half century or so, ranging from the Milgrim experiments to the prisoners’ dilemma to the strange phenomenon of anosognosia. When I was young, the field was pretty much covered by “behavioral science,” but there’s a lot more to it now than behavior. Consider Paul Bloom’s essentialist theory of pleasure: we like what we like because we know that we like it. The irrationality of our pleasures has little to do with the inputs, considered debased by the philosophers, of the senses; it is all in our once-supposedly rational minds.

There is an ethical urgency to this work. In an autocratic age, it’s enough to understand the pathologies of individual despots. In democracies, however, we need working theories of everyday human understanding — theories that aren’t grounded in the idea that we’re fallen, defective creatures. We need to learn how to make mistakes without feeling existentially diminished by them. We need to study what Kathryn Schulz calls “wrongology” as a tool for being right a lot more often than we are now.

Photo: Kathleen Moriarty.

7:30 AM It’s only fair that, since we’re in no mood for a holiday, we’re not going to get one.

When we got home from a fireworks-viewing party last night, there was a message on the answering machine. It was Megan, calling to ask if she and Ryan could spend the holiday at with at our house, working. That is, they would work and we would take care of Will. So of course that’s what we’re going to do.

Or at least that’s what we were going to do as of late last night. Who knows, in this heat, what will happen. We were not cheered by the taxi driver who brought us home, not when he asked if we thought that there would be a blackout this week. It’s going to be sunny and awful right through Friday.

10:15 AM Holiday conditions persist at the apartment; we’ve had no word from downtown. We’re hoping that everyone is sleeping. We’re hoping that nobody read the foregoing and concluded that our welcome wouldn’t be warm. We’re told that we are not as funny as we think we are, sometimes.

Here’s what it is: we’re in no mood for other people to have a holiday. Oh, that’s not right, either. But we like our Mondays to be Mondays. Mail, packages, dry-cleaning &c. 

If we’re not keen on holidays for ourselves, that’s only because we have so many of them. When you get right down to it, we work about three and a half days a week. The rest of the time is spent emptying the dishwasher — and we’re lucky to have the dishwasher!

Running two errands between eight and nine, we found the air to be sweet and not to humid. We tried to fix that memory, to give us something to look forward to in the weeks or months to come. After this week of torrid summertime.

Then we read the Times. Hmmm, what’s this? A long story about the Staten Island Cricket Club, and no mention of Joseph O’Neill? Have we missed something?

NB: We are ALWAYS in the mood for Will.

3:45 PM Kathleen is napping in the living room, because Megan and Will are resting in the bedroom. Such is the aftermath of a lunch delivered by Burger Heaven. Ryan, it’s true, is hard at work, but all he had for lunch was a bagel.

Megan suggested that we assemble a colander-ful of safe items for Will to play with. The corn brush (for flossing silk from corn cobs), the mushroom brush (for removing dirt), a stainless steel measuring cup. Scouting for items brought us up against a number of utensils that were greasy from hanging over the stove. They’re in the dishwasher now. We’re lucky to have the dishwasher!

 4:30 PM Everyone gone. Megan and Ryan did what they had to do — even though Will got wind of the fact that a meeting was in progress somewhere in the apartment, and fussed accordingly. The O’Neills will be back on Thursday, after Will’s first swimming lesson and his six-month checkup. That, at any rate, is the plan.

Kathleen drifted from the love seat in the living room to her proper bed, and is still napping. She has had a big weekend: lots of closet re-org. Also shopping; hours at Lord & Taylor, Bloomingdale’s.

Now what?

The weather was glorious this morning — that is the only true word for it. Cool and clear and breezy and bright. To run an errand before lunch, I wore what I like to wear when I go out: pleated slacks, a colorful shirt, a light sports jacket (you might call it a “coat,” as in “coat and tie”), and an Ivy cap. It is grand to be comfortable in town clothes.

Walking out of the building onto the driveway, I felt so on top of things that it scared me: surely such an access of serenity must herald a disaster. But as I made my way up 86th Street — I was toting a bag of dry cleaning to Perry Process — I felt that the disaster was all behind me. I believed that I had earned this sense of being right with the world — finally. Most people enjoy it when they’re young, in the first flush of adulthood. But it seemed to me not only that fifty-odd years of poking and questioning and falling all over myself was enough, already, but that it had finally yielded results. My life felt like the clearest of fountains.

Of course, I tremble to write any of this down. Am I crazy? Do I crave a visit from the gods of irony — or, for that matter, from the Old Testament divinity who took everything away from Job? I know that everything in my life could go spectacularly wrong right this second, beginning with sudden physiological failures and working outwards toward mischiefs like identity theft. The horror of Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man is never far from my imagination’s grasp — something that may explain my perennially guilty conscience.

But I’m learning, from Web sites like Jonah Lehrer’s Frontal Cortex, and books like Kathryn Schulz’s Being Wrong, that it’s a mistake to confuse the belief that things are going well with the knowledge of their frailty. These rival and inconsistent states of mind cohabit the cranium with frictionless ease. That’s because they inhabit different regions of the brain. I’ve learned, just in the past couple of days, to think of myself as a “frontal agnostic.” The advenced — perhaps “pre-frontal” is the word — regions of my grey matter (evolutionarily recent puddles of intelligence shimmering in the folds somewhere just behind my eyebrows) know that — well, the whole point is that they don’t know anything. Here, life is a matter of working hypotheses and go-bags. It’s in the vaster, richer interior of the old bean that I savor life’s pleasure with a constitutional inability to imagine its being taken away.

The big challenge of this wonderful new way of being intelligent is keeping the agnostic brain from spoiling the back-brain’s fun, while at the same time making sure that the pleasure centers never get their hands on the car keys.

The missing package is either a Borsalino cap that I bought at a clearance sale from Hartford & York, or the complete works of Wolfgang Amadé Mozart, for I forget how much money. Under $200, though! Jillions of discs at practically pennies per! Will the performances (or the recordings) be terrible? Who knows? I don’t much care. I bought the set pretty much for its index. I know almost everything in Mozart’s catalogue that’s at all famous, and I know it pretty well. But there’s lots of stuff that isn’t well known. Not that we’re talking about hidden diamonds. Mozart wrote a lot of okay-rate music that is fairly forgettable. He wrote less and less of it as he grew older, and after 1783 he wrote nothing that isn’t worth listening to. But he was no child genius as a composer. (That said, I’ve always found the six minuets that are now catalogued as K 61 — I think; it used to be 65 — to be especially delightful. Mozart wrote them on the eve of his thirteenth birthday. They’re no more routine than the great Clarinet Quintet, from the other end of Mozart’s life.)

Buying this complete set of Mozart required cutting through a web of taboos. Way back in — when was it, 1991? the bicentennial of Mozart’s death? Maybe it was long before that, when LPs were still the default — the prestigious Philips label (part of the Polygram complex that also owns prestigious labels Deutsche Gramophon and “English Decca”) issued a series of boxed sets, numbered as volumes, in a “Mozart Edition.” I do not believe that it was intended to be exactly comprehensive, but I may be wrong about that. If someone had given it to me, I don’t know what I’d have done with it. The main thing wasn’t the quality of the performances, which was excellent but not really to my taste, but the packaging. Jewel boxes take up so much room! If the Edition were to come out today, it would arrive in the same sort of box as my cheapo set (I’m guessing), with each CD in a sleeve of some kind. I can certainly live with that. A treat that I still haven’t tired of is a Complete Brahms (Deutsche Gramophon). It sits atop my vestigial stereo system, a cube with Brahms on every face.

As I write this, I’m listening to Van Cliburn’s Cold War recording of the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto, the one that was So Famous that nobody else recorded it for ages. Again, I’ll beg your pardon regarding the details. The Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto has endowed me with one of the many entries in my Modern Jackass portfolio. Long ago, when I had just enough knowledge to be dangerous, I castigated Tchaikovsky for not developing the magnificent opening theme of the concerto. Magnificent yes; opening theme, no: it’s a classic introduction, or what snazzy music writers about Haydn and Mozart’s opening gambits might now and then call a “propyleia.” Meaning a porch. But it was fashionable to dump on Tchaikovsky in the late Sixties and early Seventies. Which turned out to be not all bad: I had to discover for myself a composer who had become so cliché-popular that nobody really heard him anymore. I still hear André Previn’s recording of Sleeping Beauty as a revelation of how incredibly gorgeous music can be, without a hair out of place.

As I’ve gotten older, all my time-machine speculations have come to involve Mozart. If I could go back in time, I’d check out one of Mozart’s extravagant costume balls — he had a flat with a ballroom for a while — and ask the guests what they thought of their host. People like to think of Mozart as a droll wraith, shyly seeking a quiet corner in which to dash off the odd Requiem. Nothing could be further &c. The man went in for loud clothes and big jewels. He made so much money, for a few years at least, that he could carry on like an aristocrat, and quite alongside the brilliance of his music there is the cunning of his parody of patrons. I’d like to know more about that. I don’t think that I’d have anything to say to Mozart himself, unless I thought that a request for three more string quintets might bear fruit.

If the time machine worked the other way, of course, I’d drag Mozart up to my place in Yorkville, where I’d worry about which was more likely to give him a heart attack, the taxis down in the street or the Brahms on the Nano. What am I saying? Haydn’s London Symphonies would be shocking enough. You know, of course, that the people in London asked Mozart first, right?

A grey day, never quite hot enough for air conditioning but too unsettled to do without it. I was tired in the afternoon, partly from the weather and partly from an approaching cold. The day was not wasted, but I spent a good part of the later afternoon and early evening reading Colum McCann’s Letting the Great World Spin.

This isn’t a book that I planned to read; I bought it because Crawford Doyle had a signed copy. Thick, really. But I was a different reader then. I was a different reader until a few weeks ago, when I realized that I don’t want to read so much new fiction anymore. I want to re-read books that I’ve loved. The idea of keeping au courant because I keep a blog no longer requires piling up so many shiny new books.

So this is different: this isn’t a decision to buy fewer books. The buying fewer books will take place naturally, because what I’ve decided is to read less new fiction. And to wait until it’s not so new. In any case, I wouldn’t buy a signed copy of a book that I hadn’t been planning to read, not any more.

I didn’t like Mr McCann’s book for most of the first section. There was a faint, almost occult streak of the Celtic sentimentality that put me off Irish fiction as a matter of course for over twenty years, making me come late to Colm Tóibín’s table. The second section — the one about Claire, the reluctant Park Avenue matron who has joined a support group of bereft Vietnam mothers — was even harder going: the last thing I want to read about now, with my little grandson nestled in my heart, is senseless war. But the third section filled my sails, and I was sorry when it ended.

Mr McCann writes very well, but he doesn’t write about the things that interest me. For example, I find his descriptions of a Bronx housing project, in which a number of lives intersect, disappointingly impressionistic and even somewhat lifted. He seems to be relying on a pool of common knowledge, gleaned mainly from the movies but also from novels such as Underworld, to set the scene. Not that I want to spend time in a housing project! But if that’s where a novelist takes me, he’ll have to provide a full tour. Instead of which I sensed anxious discussions with friends and perhaps even editors and agents about how little descriptive passage-work might suffice, all in the interest of keeping readers amused.

What I am not interested in is reading about bodies. We all occupy bodies during our time on earth, and nothing can be done without them, but of course what I’m talking about is the sheer physical activity, say, of tightrope walking, in which the brain plays an important but subsidiary (“integrated”) role. When I think of the time devoted to acquiring acrobatic expertise, I want to cry: if you must do something with your body, at least make beautiful music! I know that physical activity brings great satisfaction to many people. It has never done so to me — never brought more than short spasmodic states of lighthearted vacation that compare unfavorably with the rapture of a relieved itch — and I have certainly never enjoyed thinking or reading about it. Now I’m going to stop.

And sex! Reading about sex was ruined for me by Philip Roth, in an excerpt from Sabbath’s Ghost that I’ve never forgiven The New Yorker for publishing. In it, the protagonist masturbates upon a rival’s grave. I was amazed that this gesture, by any literary accounting, could be summed up as anything but deranged and disgusting. I’ve been heartened to find a new warning on the Internet lately, reminding readers, before they click through, that dire images cannot be “unseen.” The idea that The New Yorker would print anything that I’d be sorry to have read never occurred to me before that episode. In any case, I’m going to bail before the old ban on “plumbing” becomes absolute, and novelists take to describing their characters’ colonic upheavals.

While I’ve been writing, the clouds have broken, and a quantity of rain has fallen, but the air is still thick with wet and anything but refreshing. My favorite childhood song is the one about the old man snoring through the pouring rain: I think that I always wanted to grow up to be that guy. But I would never want to sleep through rainfall. Rest, perhaps, but held on the edge of sleep like a leaf upon a grate. (22 June 2010)