A certain off-putting jokiness seems the only explanation for publishing “Silence,” Michael Symmons Roberts’s account of a retreat at Pluscarden, “the oldest working monastery in Britain,” in an issue of Granta devoted to Sex. Mr Roberts is not only a poet but a professor of poetry, and while his descriptive prose is lean and full of tact, and although he never encapsulates the object of his visit, there is nothing unconsidered in the thirteen short chapters. His tone of voice evokes monastic austerity as powerfully as any remark that he makes. But this is no sentimental journey. A Catholic married man with sons, he is honest enough to make the following confession:

I think about my own sons, and what I would do if one of them wanted to take up this life. I do believe that the constant prayer of these monastic communities is important, more vital than anything that goes on in the Pentagon or the UN. I like to think that I would support my sons in testing their vocation, and encouraging them to follow it through it is is real. But in reality, I would be heartbroken.

Once I’d read “Silence” all the way through, it persuaded me that curiosity about what Mr Roberts expected to find at Pluscarden could only be idle. What I backed up to was the relation between faith in God, which for Mr Roberts appears to be a completed gift, and the problematization of the self that has sent pious people into monastic seclusion since long before Benedict of Nursia regulated the practice with his famous Rule.

“Without a name or history I wake / Between my body and the day.” Auden was right. That is the chasm here, the tension. When everything that “self” means in the world is called into question, all that remains is the space, the tension between your body and the day. The monks have no career structure, no lovers and no children. I have all those things, but they mean nothing here. I think I’m losing myself. And of course, this is the point. You lose a sense of self in order to find God. “Always let go,” Father Benedict said to me, “never cling on. John of the Cross is fierce about this, and we strive for it, a constant letting go, to come closer to God.”

I heartily recommend Mr Roberts’s limpid and extremely sympathetic memoir. But nothing in the paragraph that I’ve excerpted makes sense to me, except the words. I come away from it, in fact, with a suspicion that the simplest way to build up an oppressive sense of self is to believe in God.

In my old age, I am coming to doubt the existence of the self, largely but not entirely for the reasons that cognitive scientists are advancing to discredit the concept. This isn’t to deny that I don’t come along bursting with needs and desires. But these seem to fall under two headings — wants of the body and demands for social status — that have little to do with some interior construction, known only to me, that we might call the self. My ideas about physical comfort are all too well known to everyone around me — and I am quite unashamed of them. When they become inconvenient, I blame the world, not my body. And nothing could be more public, or less interior, than my desire, such as it is, for respect and admiration. Or anybody else’s. The only thing that a putative self might do to affect my social standing is to interfere with my grasp of what it really is — to the extent that social standing can be grasped.

If I’m “conflicted” about anything in this life, it is not about how my self feels about my id. It’s rather about the difficulty of squaring the pursuit of social status with the gratification of material desire. Again: nothing about this could be less peculiar to me. Every healthy human being labors with the tension between various lacks and gaps that can’t be easily squared. And allow me to conclude with a short word about love: what’s “self” got to do with it? We’re too accustomed to talking “realistically” about the “failings” into which our longings lead us, and not nearly accustomed enough to remember our natural generosity — which may be considered, if reductively, as a desire, the desire to give. Just because evolutionary biology hasn’t so far explained altruism to anyone’s satisfaction doesn’t make it imaginary.

So: what’s left? The Benedictines of Pluscarden are obviously hostile to desire, but where is the self that they claim to be letting go of? What would it be doing if they gave it free rein? Why isn’t it enough to live the simple monastic round of hours and plainsong that they have chosen as a way of honoring their Creator? Why must there be a struggle — even in the most secluded cloister? And what is the struggle about, really?

At the risk of making a hash of the story, I’m going to try to tell you about this afternoon’s Poseidon adventure.

Megan and I were talking in the bedroom. Megan was leaning against the bed, having stood up to tend to Will, who is at the age of requiring a lot of maternal tending. As in, why should he settle for less. Nonetheless, at the moment the story began, I was holding him. I was seated in my reading chair, and Will was seated in my lap.

On the mahogany tea table next to me, there was the nice plastic tray from Feldman’s that I’d used, that morning, to serve Kathleen’s tea and toast. The breakfast things had been removed long since, but the tray remained, and it was now laden with Will’s things. There was the velvet rabbit-in-a-hat that Quatorze found three exemplaires of, all of which send Will into paroxysms of delight when his mother uses them to play hide-and-seek. There was Sophie Vulli, or Vulli Sophie; I’m never quite sure which it is — the French teething giraffe. And there was a baby-bottle cap, which out of context looks like a small clear bucket without a handle. The cap was lying inverted on the tray, its top down.

Will decided to exert his godlike physical powers on the tray, which of course slid over the mahogany surface like a piano on lard. The thing that I forgot to tell you about the tray, but which of course you’d have taken for granted if you, too, had some nice plastic trays like it from Feldman’s, is that it has a sort of rim or lip. Once Will began playing God, this rim was powerless to prevent the overtipping of Sophie and the rabbit, but but it checked the bottle cap’s toppling, notwithstanding the vertiginous angle. Will assessed the damage that he had done and decided that It Was Good.

“Poseidon Adventure! Poseidon Adventure!” I blurted in a mock-radio voice. Assuming the role of a sportscaster, I told the listening fans that the poor folk huddled in that bottle cap were in mortal fear for their lives, hoping against hope that they would not be tipped over the rim of the tray and into the abyss of the carpet. Then Will jerked the tray with a spasmosis befitting his age, so that it was suddenly at a different, equally precipitous, angle. The bottle cap had held on, amazingly. In my sick, downtown manner, I announced that cries of “Shoot me now” could be heard from the surviving passengers. Megan and I were chuckling mightily. But Will, who, holding the tray at the angle of dispose, seemed to have decided that It Was Not Good, burst into tears.

While we were quick to comfort him and to silence his sobbing (he was smiling in an instant), we burst out laughing. “He’s seen the movie!” I declared.

I wonder now if Megan was aware that the first Poseidon Adventure came out when she was rather radically younger than Will is now: still, that is, in utero. At least that’s what I recall. What I recall most clearly about the experience of seeing the movie was that I could hardly bring myself to fill pasta pots with water for weeks.

One of my homiest maxims is that being ahead of the times is just another way of being wrong. You don’t get any points for seeing what’s coming if you can’t persuade anybody else that you’re right. And since almost everything that we see coming involves a shout or two of “Repent!”, it’s no wonder that nobody wants to listen.

But I’m going to venture one of my ahead-of-things ideas anyway. Having read well over six hundred feeds this afternoon alone, I feel moderately comfortable with the claim that “nobody is talking about this.” All that means, though, is that nobody is talking about what I mean to propose in my little corner of the Blogosphere. If you’ve run into this idea somewhere else, please write to me and let me know.

What I’m wondering is why President Obama hasn’t nationalized the Deepwater Horizon problem. Just the one catastrophic well, not British Petroleum! Why is he waiting for the BP people to come up with a plan, when, nearly two months into the disaster, that’s precisely what they’ve so signally failed to do. Does he believe that American voters, most of whom understand embarrassingly little about the complexities of the problem — and I’m talking about the complexities that surround the difficulty of fixing it, not the headache of actually sealing the well itself — does President Obama believe that Americans are going to be reassured by talk of making sure that BP pays for the cleanup?

Until the weekend before last, I was saying that I’d like Deepwater to be placed under military control, if only the military knew how to deal with messes like Deepwater. Then Deborah Solomon asked Christopher Brownfield, a retired submarine captain, what could be done, and it suddenly seemed as though only the military knows what to do about Deepwater. How to seal it by blowing it up, that is. And not with nuclear weapons, either.

Why hasn’t that been done?
I’m very skeptical about why we haven’t done it. I think the reason is that when the oil companies are in charge of bringing the solutions to the table, they are going to advocate solutions that allow them to continue recovering the oil.

The answer to my “why not?” question is, I’m increasingly convinced, that President Obama is a meritocrat, somebody who tested well into the elite and who, ipso facto, is largely happy with the world as it is, because he has, qua meritocrat, been rewarded for understanding how it works. Why would he want to change the game? I don’t mean to sound a note of cynicism; I believe that Barack Obama quite sincerely has the best interests of the United States at heart, and that he would do anything that he could think of to solve its problems. The catch is that there are too many things that he can’t think of, because if he’d allowed himself to be distracted by them on his laudable climb up the ladder — to achieve an honor that will probably shine brighter if he serves just the one term, that of being the nation’s first president of color — he’d never have made it to the top.

So, when the president summons bankers and oilmen to the Oval Office, what he sees is other guys who have tested well, just like him. He’s doing his job; why can’t they? (There is simply no other explanation for his countenancing the presence of the odious Lawrence Summers.)

The president that I wish Mr Obama would model himself upon is not FDR — for a thousand reasons, not the least of which is that the president who succeeded FDR was every bit as important, but also a thousand times more down-to-earth. Harry Truman assumed that the fast-talking experts who paraded through his office were trying in one way or another to pull the wool over his eyes, and, as an accomplished haberdasher, he had an eye for wool. In the history of the Twentieth Century White House, Harry Truman’s firing of the bellicose Douglas McArthur is sadly unparalleled. But there’s still time for Barack Obama to give it a Twenty-First Century try.

I’ve been reading The New Yorker for nearly fifty years (OMG!), but it has hardly ever upset me, and, until today, it has never presented me with anything that I would call, simply, odious.

What was notable in all the writing, above and beyond a mastery of language and of storytelling, was a palpable sense of ambition. These writers are not all iconoclasts; some are purposefully working within existing traditions. But they are all aiming for greatness: fighting to get our attention, and to hold it, in a culture that is flooded with words, sounds, and pictures; fighting to surprise, to entertain, to teach, and to move not only us but generations of readers to come. 

Nothing, nothing in the world, could disgust me more, in the pages of a magazine that cares about writing, than “a palpable sense of ambition.” Does it all come down to bats, hoops, and statistics — forever? Do the pimply ados rule, even though they’re in their forties? If so, shoot me now! (I leave for another time the way this passage echoes an upbeat quarterly report.)

It’s true: I think that public ambition is a terrible thing — if you’re not doing something better just for the private, personal sake of it, then go hang! I would rather die than push what I’m doing. It’s up to me to find out who’s doing good things, not the other way round. Serious culture rests on the the authority of connoisseurship. Everything else is just horrible awful preening.

I am so not an Anglophone at heart.

Like everyone else today, I worried about the Kord Campbells. I can’t have been the only reader who felt that this family of four was as metabolically unprepared for the long-term onslaught of the Internet as Native Americans were for “firewater.” Maybe everything will work out. Mr Campbell is evidently a producer of viable businesses, something that very few Internet addicts can claim to be. But it’s hard to push aside the sense that he and his son have some painful rehab time ahead.

In the middle of a chat this morning, Megan told of doing a fair amount of clucking when she encountered a mother with a stroller in one hand and a cell phone in the other. (I see this every live-long day up here on Planet Yorkville.) Then she saw a second mom doing the same thing, only this woman was carrying one of her children in a sling. A sling and yet on the cell — this did not compute for Megan. (I can attest that carrying a child in a sling is so profoundly satisfying that I can’t imagine wanting to trash the experience with the noise of a phone call to someone who isn’t there.) When I mentioned all of this to Kathleen, however, I was surprised to hear her take the part of the other mothers, whom in her predication were stuck at home day after day (as Megan is not) with infants and without adult contact. Point taken. But I’m still appalled by the people (and, up here, they are mostly women) who want to turn my sidewalk into their living room.

In short, the Internet bristles with manners issues. But they’re not like the old manners issues. The old manners issues were all about code, about knowing how to cue your awareness of comme il faut. That’s why the earnest boomers of my generation agitated against manners on principle: by the time the Fifties were over, there was nothing but code to good behavior. It was all a matter of signalling. The underlying objective of providing comfort to one’s companions had been forgotten.

(If it hadn’t been for Trollope, I’d never have understood what being a gentleman was all about, and why it’s so important to be one — even if you’re a woman.)

I’m sure that Kord Campbell sees himself as an active entrepreneur, as someone who acts upon the world in ways that lead, inter alia, to million-dollar start-up sales. I would propose, however, that he learn to regard his dependency on manifold Internet connectivity as a passive, almost hydrostatic search for the most satisfying environment that the Internet can provide. I would urge him to replace this cosy project with a determination to make the  room in which his body finds itself lodged the most interesting place in the world.

Something tells me that Brenda Campbell is ready and waiting to help him do just that.  

It’s a lovely summer evening here in New York, with clear skies and cool, dry air. The heat wave that was supposed to be extinguished by thunderstorms seems to have spontaneously dissipated. I have rarely been more disgusted with the weather.

Kathleen, who is visiting her father and brother in North Carolina, was to fly home this afternoon, but given those predicted thunderstorms and the estimated delays, I urged her to rebook a flight for tomorrow, and to stay where she was. As she’s been having a very pleasant time, she was happy to humor me. So I’m the one who’s home alone.

Which wouldn’t be so bad, if I hadn’t had a completely inane day. The air-conditioning and the Vornado fans kept physical discomfort at bay, but there is no way to ease the psychological displacement of really humid weather. I was counting on some atmospheric violence to shock me out of my torpor. Curses foiled again!

There were all sorts of things to do, but not a volt of energy to get me off my duff. I read and read and read. Then I watched The Iron Giant, an animated adaptation of a kids’ book by Ted Hughes. Quatorze brought it over, about a hundred years ago, along with a number of other recommended titles that it has taken me a shameful length of time to get to. Truth to tell, I haven’t been watching many DVDs lately, not out of the kitchen anyway — and in the kitchen I play only movies that I know quite well. I’m ashamed to confess that I wept almost all the way through The Iron Giant. My eyes are still sore, and it’s difficult to read what I’m writing. What a sap I am.

What to do about dinner? What to do about dinner, that is, in the wake of my movie snack? Salami, Jarlsberg, Smartfood. I feel larded up enough for swimming the English Channel — well, I could be towed across, maybe; I can hardly get out of my chair and across the room.

Sixes and sevens isn’t the half of it!

This was supposed to be an entry about Tyler Cowen’s ideas about entrepreneurial regulators (he doesn’t like them), but circumstances required my presence at a long (and enoyable; not complaining) business dinner, as a result of which I am no longer fit to write about abstractions.

Will ate his first bit of solid food today — mashed banana — and we were all immensely impressed. The first few teaspoonfuls he interrupted with a lot of wishful spoonholding, but he was quick to realize that keeping his hands out of the way guaranteed the passage of sweet fruit into his mouth. Will took to spoon feeding so quickly, in fact, that we wondered if he hadn’t rather sweetly but impatiently been waiting for it for days, if not weeks.

If you know a grandfather as besotted with his grandson’s achievements as I am with my own’s, I hope that you will introduce us to one another.

A couple of neat things happened today — even without them, the day would have been grand — but the neatest thing may not, in fact, have happened at all. It may have been an accident, a coincidence. On their way out the door, Megan said something to Will about “Doodad,” and she and I saw him lift his eyes to me.

If I weren’t such a narcissist, that would have been the second-neatest thing. The neatest thing was Will’s falling into a deep nap on my chest, while we were sitting out on the balcony. I was stroking his back, absently, thinking about him but also about his life to come, in the city that stretched East before me — when I sit out there with Will, I’m supremely aware that his future is likely to be be full of intersections with thousands of slightly peculiar people (peculiar in the same way that all other babies are suddenly funny-looking) — and it was actually a few minutes before I realized that he had fallen deeply asleep. For half an hour, I sat with him perched on my right forearm, his head tucked to the left. I could gush about the profound gratifcation of being completely trusted &c, but what I meditated upon was the delight of having him asleep in my arms. He weights nearly seventeen pounds: there won’t be much more of that!

Actually, the neatest thing that happened was my carrying Will about in a sling, just like his mother’s, only larger. There is much to be learned about slings, and I had the good sense to follow Megan’s advice and buy a ten-pound bag of Carolina rice to practice with. I had thought that practicing with Will, with Megan there to help me, would be good enough, but I’ve become a quick study on points such as this, and I saw at once that Will is not to be confused with the outsized practice dollies at Metro Minis. It was only after seven or eight practice runs with the bag of rice that I was allowed to take Will himself on an errand to the Food Emporium. Megan came with, and I don’t know which of us was more beaming, I for carrying Will without having to hold him. or Megan for having a father who would practice with ten-pound bags of rice in order to pull it off. I will say this about slings: nothing is more tonic to a five month-old baby.

What made the day truly special was the dinner at the end: both Ryan and Kathleen came uptown for an impromtu steak. My hunch that Ryan would appreciate a baked potato that had spent over an hour in a hot oven turned out to be correct. For dessert, we had chocolate and coffee Häagen Dasz, which made us all wonder what Will’s favorite flavors will be.

Some day, of course, Will will look at me and call me “Doodad,” and nobody will think anything of it. Except me. I can’t imagine getting used to this angel.

Even if I wasn’t quite as sparky today as I was yesterday and the day before, I continued to get lots of little stuff done, and some big stuff, and to enjoy life as, really, I haven’t enjoyed it in a very long time. That’s what breaks are for, no? Of course, my 62 year-old’s idea of “enjoyment” would send any healthy twentysomething grasping for a pulse. But I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

This week’s chicken salad involved doing things by halves: a dressing composed of half an avocado, half a small tub of Greek yogurt, the juice of half a lemon, and less than half a teaspoon of curry powder. The other half of the avocado was cubed and mixed with the white meat from a roast chicken, together with one minced rib of celery and two small spring onions — what my parents called “scallions.” Given the heat wave, the substituion of yogurt for mayonnaise was particularly welcome, but Kathleen had the bright idea of adding Zante currants, which I’ll try next time. We think that they’ll balance the yogurt’s chalkiness very nicely.

It was warmer than I liked (and it still is), but I wasn’t stalled by the heat. I simply took things easy. Having put the salad together, I washed up and went back out onto the balcony and finished the latest Donna Leon, which I believe is called A Question of Belief. My first e-book. When I sat down, I had no idea where I was in the (vitual) text, no sense of how much more I had to read. Now that this uncertainty was bothering me for the first time, I spent a little time with the doodads that appear on demand in the margins. They taught me something entirely new: I had read 53% of the book. How utterly coo-coo.

The reading was preceded by a moment of intense internal debate. Reading Donna Leon on the iPad was all very well, but it wasn’t going to do anything about the piles of physical books that I am trying to bring under control (= “make smaller”). I very nearly settled down with Deanna Fei’s A Thread of Sky, a novel that I’m well into and that I’m liking very much. My fondness for Asian-American fiction has lately been clouded, however, by a rather fishy “complicity”: I am hoping that my grandson will grow up to have primarily Asian friends. Having scolded myself for this improper-sounding objective, I observe that Will lives in a good neightborhood for realizing it.

Earlier in the day, on that round of errands that I looked forward to last night, I added a drop-in at Barnes & Noble. I’ve been in the new store at Lex and 86th precisely three times, including today, and what I wanted this afternoon was a “fun video.” As I trawled the DVD shelves, it became painfully clear that my idea of a fun video, right now, is The Ghost Writer, and only The Ghost Writer. I tried to console myself with Lust Caution, but although Ang Lee’s setting of Eileen Chang’s story is one of the great Chinese movies, it is not a “fun video.” Imagine: I was actually combing the Criterion Collection display for someting “fun” that I didn’t already own.

Here’s an idea for a “fun video”: Ewan McGregor remakes Yojimbo. Can you dig it?

It’s awful. I’ve re-read yesterday’s diary entry several times, but if I didn’t remember what I thought I was writing about — a memory that’s completely independent of the words that I set down here — I wouldn’t know what I was trying to talk about. My excuse for avoiding specifics was that specifics would be deadly dull to read about. In fact, they’d have been even duller to write about. I was taking it easy. Sorry.

If I weren’t old and calloused, I’d nourish the hope that tomorrow or the next day might be just like today. But days like today happen once a month at best, doubtless because I’m a stupid dolt who doesn’t understand his own rhythm. I was busy all day, and on many different levels. I wrote up two reading items, the New Yorker story (a chunk of Jonathan Franzen’s new novel — exciting to read but a disappointing displacement of genuine short fiction) and Operation Mincemeat. I uploaded seven or eight CDs onto the pop-side laptop (the desktop is cordoned off for the classics), and edited the very eccentric playlist that wakes me up every morning. The paperwork that I did was not very serious but it wasn’t frivolous, either — a new medium. I read a lot; I started, finally, to read Steve Pincus’s 1688, a book that I’ve been dying to take up for months but that I insisted on setting aside until I’d finished Peter Wilson’s Thirty Years War. I did a number of little kitchen things, culminating in a very nice dinner of veal piccata, a dish that I haven’t made in over twenty years. Call it beginner’s luck: it was delicious.

I sorted out our Manhattan Theatre Club tickets. Don’t as me why, but Kathleen arranged for this year’s tickets to be held at the box office or in the patron’s lounge of MTC’s venues, with the result that I’ve had no idea of dates. It’s a good thing that I took care of this today, because Kathleen bought seats for Red that conflict with one of our MTC subscription evenings. All fixed.

I wrote a few letters, and I had a good talk with the Web designer who is helping me with the “tablet edition” of The Daily Blague. He’s also helping me with the tablet edition of Portico, a site to be known as Civil Pleasures. Getting these two sites up and running is the minimum required assignment of this spring break. I can’t wait to see this column of text fill the iPad screen from side to side.

So it wasn’t a day of mindless bustle; nor was it a day of “writing.” Thanks to the heavenly weather, I felt as though I were spending the day in paradise. A paradise where I have to clean up and pay the bills, true. But even more of a paradise for that very reason.

I’m looking forward to tomorrow. After a morning at home (the Book Review review, can we?), I’ll head out on a round of errands that will begin at Perry Process and Staples, carry me to Williams-Sonoma, and perhaps deposit me at the Museum. (And I know that I’ve already forgotten something here!) There may even be a croque monsieur for lunch.

For eight months, I’ve been engaged in a personal project so intimate that I didn’t know how to describe it. Until this past weekend, when I saw, startlingly, that I’ve been taking the elements of my everyday life apart and putting them back in the way that I want them arranged right now. The schedules, the possessions — the materiality of time and volume. Everything has been up for review. And everything is too boring to mention.

One unexpected boon connected with this project is that it doesn’t prompt me to ask: What took so long! This is  not a project that I could have undertaken any earlier. Because in the old days, in my life until eight months ago, I was still growing, still open to options. Now I’m more like a retired person, eager to give the heave-ho to items and routines that are still essentially speculative: one of these days, I’ll get round to this. Maybe so, but I’m not going to make any room for such possibilities. While trying to throw away as little as possible, I’m focused on what I’m actually doing right now, not on what might take my fancy six months hence.

And I feel the very opposite of retired: I’m finally, at long last, engaged. Completely hooked up. I know that this entry would be vastly more cogent if only I would spell out a few examples of the changes in my thinking about everyday life, and, especially, a few examples of objects and outlooks that I have jettisoned. But the building blocks that I’m talking about here are incredibly dull. To make things exciting, I ought to confess that I am never going to read all of Proust in French. But that happens to be a confession that I can’t yet make — I’m still holding out hope for that. All the shifting and relocation has involved bricks both smaller and less intrinsically interesting. At least to talk about.

Is this entry a fail?

The more I watch An Education, the stronger my conviction becomes that, in a virtual galaxy of great performances — great performances — the most interesting thing about the movie, for me, is Rosamund Pike’s Helen. Nick Hornby’s script is always trying to get a laugh in at Helen’s expense, but Lone Scherfig’s direction propels the character along another line altogether, one that Ms Pike proves to be supremely gifted at realizing. The actress usually plays conventionally sharp girls, but, in Helen, Ms Pike triumphs as a bimbo who feels real pity for people with brains. What is the point of brains? she asks at every turn. And the people with brains don’t have an answer.

An Education is set in the early Sixties, since which time people of all kinds — those with surabundant brains as well as those with none — have been posing Helen’s challenge. What is the use of brains? Aside from a small patch of possibility that has been consecrated to the engineers who build airplanes and power plants, the ground has not been congenial to intellect. As if to prove the man-in-the-street’s skepticism about smart people, smart people spent a big chunk of the postwar period on something called Theory. Given a choice between Helen’s anti-intellectualism and Theory, I know which lesser evil I’d choose.

Let me be the first to confess that I don’t know how to talk to people who have no interest in brains. But let me also insist that I regard this as a terrible personal failing, and one that is perhaps fatally widespread among bright people. Why do I think that the Helens of the world are right to doubt the utlity of anything that I have to say? Simple: I’ve never made an effort to sympathise with their longing for straightforward certainty. It’s true that I don’t want “straightforward certainty” for myself, but to make a point of that difference is thick-headed. I’m certain — functionally — of a lot of things, and if I could hook that confidence up to my ability to speak with honest reassurance, I just might quell the anxieties of someone otherwise prone to mistake my curiosity for mercurial inconstancy.

The deep scandal of it all is that, although I’ve an imposing presence, I can squeak like a footnote, which only makes my size ridiculous. Like bright people everywhere since the end of World War II, I’m preoccupied by the need to say exactly what I think, no matter how many tedious qualifications this involves. The Helens of this world are not going to listen to me until I show myself to be more interested in talking to them than I am in getting the message just right. The minute I persuade them to listen to me, it won’t matter whether I’ve stated the message absolutely correctly. They’ll get what I’m driving at even if I can’t put it into words.

Allow me to apologize for failing to file a midnight entry yesterday. I was too tired up to write up anything of general interest, and everything that I had done during the day had involved a member of my immediate family on personal terms. While I don’t want to suggest any crises or deep disturbances, the day was fairly intense — which is why I was too tired to think my way around the problem of not being able to write a diary entry without violating the privacy of others.

Even Will. When Will was an infant, I felt free to project all sorts of meaning upon his expressions, knowing full well that I was indulging in sheer fantasy. But Will is not an infant anymore — even if he can’t sit up or crawl. He’s a little fellow with a rapidly expanding personality. He’s just going to have to keep his own blog.

This isn’t to say that everything he does is off-limits. But the ordinary stuff more or less is.

Happily, today was filled with fit-to-print events. If only they were interesting! The Aeron chair that I bought on Monday was delivered by Sam Flax at about three this afternoon. At first, sitting in it, here at the desk, simply felt different — almost disappointingly so. Even when the chair had been adjusted to suit my frame, it was more unusual than pleasant. Only later, when I sat down to write the Daily Office, did I realize how comfortable it is, and how uncomfortable all my working chairs have been up to now. In my late teens, I had a crush on eighteenth-century style that made electric lamps “impossible.” I got over that fairly quickly. But my devotion to Enlightenment seating was protracted to unenlightened lengths.

So far as capital-e Ease is concerned, the new chair is just about as welcoming as my bed, and for the first time ever I’m in no hurry to finish what I’m doing and escape the desk. Who knows what prose-style improvements the Herman Miller classic will wreak.

Quatorze had dropped by to help me with the chair, and we took care of a few other things. After the delivery, I made a pot of tea. Then Quatorze headed for the West Side while I turned north, on a round of shopping errands. The weather, cool and wet, didn’t bother me while I was out in it, but the moment I entered the building I felt damply soiled. Cleaned up and in fresh clothes, I was a new man.

At the moment (I’m writing a bit early this evening, just to be sure that I write at all), two chunks of veal shank are simmering in broth and mirepoix. I’ve had a bad record with jarrets de veau this winter, buying the meat with no particular meal in mind, freezing it, and then defrosting it on uncertain afternoons, only to shove the package into the refrigerator because I was too tired to cook the contents. Inevitably, spoilage would ensue. I was very tempted to repeat this sorry tale this evening; I was late getting into the kitchen, and we won’t be eating until the verge of eleven. If nothing else, however, the apartment is filled with an appetizing fragrance.

Has it really been twenty years (or more!) since Ken Ludwig’s farce, Lend Me A Tenor, premiered on Broadway? I saw it twice, back then, once with Kathleen, and once with Megan, who was still in high school at the time. Megan remembers going, but not much more than that; and, seeing it again, this past Saturday night, I wonder what I was thinking she would make of it. I couldn’t begin to answer that question.

I didn’t remember too much of the play myself. I’d forgotten, for example, that Philip Bosco played the impresario who, in Stanley Tucci’s revival, is played by the wonderful Tony Shalhoub. Nor did I recall that J Smith Cameron played the ingénue. All I remembered was that, due to this and that mishap, a retiring young doormat of a man steps in for an ailing Italian tenor and tastes triumph as Verdi’s Otello. I wasn’t entirely sure that the ailing Italian tenor ever showed up. So Lend Me A Tenor was pretty fresh for me on Saturday night.

I like to think that Kathleen and I would have seen the revival anyway, and for the very same reason that drew the attention of our friends Judy and Curt, who were visiting from Greater Tryon. They were here for the weekend because Judy had tickets for Lulu at the Met. That was strange enough; stranger still, Judy enjoyed it — which goes to show how more genuinely musical she is than I am. (The very idea of seeing Lulu again gives me a sharp ice-cream headache.) Curt wasn’t having any of the opera, certainly, but he was game for a show or two, and Judy settled on Lend Me A Tenor because she wanted to see Jan Maxwell on stage — the Broadway stage.

For Judy had seen Ms Maxwell in a couple of productions way back in college. Both ladies hail from Fargo, North Dakota; for the matter of that, so, technically does Curt, who, until he was three years old, lived across the street from the Maxwells. (That has a decidedly G&S vibe to it, don’t you think? Something about “a twelvemonth old”…) Years ago, Kathleen and I went to see My Old Lady, because Sian Philips was starring in it; it may have been then that Judy mentioned, long distance, that she’d heard that Jan Maxwell, also in that show, was doing well on and off Broadway. Indeed. We’ve seen Ms Maxwell in at least half a dozen things since then, including, most recently, To Be Or Not To Be and The Royal Family. Now, at least, Judy and Curt can say that they’ve seen their old neighbor once — an experience that is unlikely to be repeated in Greater Tryon.

Jan Maxwell had the role that Tovah Feldshuh originated, the Italian tenor’s Italian wife. One of the meta-jokes in the farce is that Tito and Maria fight hammer and tongs in heavily accented English, never uttering a word of Italian that a Broadway audience wouldn’t comprehend. “Come-a outta here so I can keel you!” cries Maria toward the end. Ms Maxwell has been nominated for a Tony, and the photograph that usually accompanies this news shows her jumping up and down on a bed. It’s a very funny scene, and it is no figure of speech to say that she throws herself into it. But you can still tell that Ms Maxwell is an actress capable of the richest Chekhovian implications.

The play’s biggest joke, of course, is that merely donning a costume and painting your face to look like the Moor of Venice can quell your fears of being a ninety-eight-pound weakling and instill a worldly swagger. Justin Bartha made the transformation seem miraculous. As the impresario’s fretful go-fer, he was the compleat angular geek, a sonata in suspenders. But when he suavely cooed “Sure” and “Why not?” to people who, instead of seeing through his deception, took him for Tito Morelli, his voice assumed a gigolo’s unction.

Anthony LaPaglia brought to Tito Morelli’s part the build and demeanor of a Chicago gangster — a wildly successful contribution. It is Tito’s misfortune to spend the second act in flight from the police — don’t ask — but Mr LaPaglia’s tenor was not the man to let anxieties about being captured interfere with the attractions of a bodaceous leading lady who, under the mistaken impression that she has just played Desdemona to his Otello, wants to know if she was “good.” The ensuing misunderstanding is taken directly from the archives of farce, but it’s in the nature of farce to shine brightest when utterly familiar, even predictable material is brought to life by fresh actors. Jennifer Laura Thompson made a boffo and very “professional” soprano.

Mary Catherine Garrison is well on the way to becoming Broadway’s go-to ingénue, which means that her sweet heart is innocent, doe-like, and unaware in a way that brings Jean Harlow to mind. (Not very.) As Maggie, momentarily concerned that she may have had intimate relations with a lunatic,  Ms Garrison let out the  most blood-curdling scream that has ever shot into the legitimate theatre’s ether without having been prompted by a serial killer. We encourage this very talented actress to fly her freak flag early and often.

The problem with Tony Shalhoub’s performance, predictably, was that it called Stanley Tucci to mind. In the earlier phases of my dotage, I’ll be certain to tell people that I loved seeing Mr Tucci in the role of Saunders, the impresario from Central Casting. Kathleen will gently remind me that Mr Tucci never appeared on stage in any role. Oh yes, I’ll remember; it was Tony Shalhoub — Stanley Tucci’s younger, straighter twin. Saunders, modeled on Oscar Jaffe, from Twentieth Century, is an egomaniac whose brush with disaster stirs our sympathy. If Lend Me A Tenor has a fault, it’s that our sympathy quickly runs to the two men in Otello costumes whom Saunders is trying to control. They barge around a Cleveland hotel suite, up against impossible challenges. We shouldn’t want Saunders just to get out of their way, but we do.

After the theatre, our party of six high-tailed it up Eighth Avenue to Pigalle, where we tucked into what I hope will turn out to be Fossil’s latest dinner of the year. It was 12:30 when we dispersed, and the days when that hour was the beginning of the evening for Fossil are long over. But he and Quatorze were indispensable ingredients in the evening’s fun, and they’ve become great pals with Judy and Curt. So much so that, while we had the Tryonesians to brunch the next morning, Fossil and Quatorze took them to Fairway for dinner. It doesn’t get more New York than eating in the doyen of Gotham grocery stores — seriously. After all, Fairway is a Broadway theatre. 

The old régime

Although I never tried to write anything today (except of course the Daily Office, and this), I am very happy with this day-to-myself. There were minor worries and annoyances — a credit card has been compromised (but not so badly that I can’t continue to use it until the replacement arrives), and the tower computer has shown a few troubling signs of systemic instability.

And I suppose I ought to note that nothing very amusing happened. I was delighted by the job that Morning Calm (our wonderful neighborhood framer) made of some old prints that Kathleen grew up with, and that badly needed refreshing, but in mitigation there was a complete lack of ideas about where to hang the things. I ran over to the gallery while Jason was here (see “instability,” above), and picked up the dinner menu on my way home. Am I pleased with the day in spite of these humble doings or because of them? It’s hard to say, because it’s a mixture of both.

I played a round of Dwindling Lump, the fascintating household storage game. A large shopping bag full of clean, empty bottles gave way to a decidedly less voluminous box-full 0f miscellaneous kitchen doodads. The doodads were evicted from a bin to make room for baking supplies (extracts, Karo, and other things that are not wanted in everyday cooking), so that the empty bottles could have the baking supplies’ (rather inappropriate) place in the kitchen. The point of the game of Dwindling Lump is that the detritus that remains unplaced at the end of each round takes up fewer cubic feet . I am approaching zero with a zest that laughs Zeno’s paradox to scorn.

What really happened today was the decision to mount a new site, www.dailyblaguereader.com, designed expressly to be read on an iPad. The content will be the same, but the look and feel will be vastly simpler than that of The Daily Blague proper. No blogroll, no “Categories.” No comments. In important ways, the new DB won’t be a blog at all. It will be the functional equivalent, really, of the pseudo-blog that I created toward the end of the summer of 2004, when I was wrestling with the question, “Do I need a blog?”  

The genesis of the new site condensed in the course of a conversation with Steve Laico, the man who makes my sites real. I’d scheduled the phone meeting because I felt that a talk was in order, but I had no idea of what I was going to say. I knew that I wanted to do something in the way of iPad-specific design, but the particulars didn’t emerge until the conversation was well underway.

So, in case anyone is interested down the road, today is “when it happened.” The actual launch of the new site won’t be what matters. It may be that, as has often happened before, I’m uselessly ahead of the times. Great idea, but no takers yet. I don’t think so, though. I write for readers, and, as a reader, I can see that the iPad nothing less than rescues the whole business of reading from the personal computer.

Not that I’ll ever write a single entry for any of my sites on an iPad. We will all continue to work at our computers. We just won’t use them for reading.

For thirteen years, I have been taking taxis up First Avenue from the Lower East Side — Planet Megan. Imagine my surprise when, on a recent uptown lurch, the cab driver chose not to scoot through the stoplight-free tunnels in front of the United Nations complex. For the first time ever. I can’t say that the surface route was any slower, really, but the idea that we might be stopped made me fret. Not so much, though, that I didn’t catch a glimpse of the modernist monument that the United Nations has occupied for just about as long as I’ve been alive. Until now, that is; the organization has decamped so that the sixty year-old forum of international harmony can be given a new lease.

Driving by, instead of below, the front of the United Nations was this taxi ride’s second novelty. The first was a trip down East Fifth Street, which, west of Loisaida Avenue, is a cul de sac. A rather Jacobean-looking public school on Avenue B appears to have been  blocking Fifth Street since long before the United Nations was even dreamed of. Dead ends, common as dirt elsewhere in the United States, are quite unusual in Manhattan. Indeed, unless stopped, I am going to seek fame and fortune by researching a coffee-table book on the subject (lavishly illustrated). I’m going to call it Culs de Cons. I have never been able to fix the meaning of those two rather nasty French word in my mind, so it seems only sanitaire to repe them into the same title, where I can keep them out of trouble. 

Update: To the contrary notwithstanding, I heretofore nominate this entry as Most Desperate of 2010. It’s only May, I know, but, sometimes, you can just tell from the smell. 

The apartment is irremediably hot. Warm, humid, still. Evaporated perspiration burns my skin. In the blue room, a window unit coughs out chilled air, but not enough of it, and without the Vornado fan at my feet I’d be wretched.

It is at least five degrees cooler out on the balcony, but because the air is as humid out there as it is in the apartment, we don’t cool off. If some sort of high front were to blot up the damp, I’d be instantly comfortable. Unseasonable warmth has besieged us before the building’s management can have been expected to shift the HVAC to air-conditioning.  It doesn’t help that I’m working my way through the long tail of a cold.

The good news is that tomorrow is another day.

Will had his four-month checkup at the pediatrician’s this morning, and shots were involved. The good news was a nap that lasted an unbelievable two-and-a-quarter hours; somewhat against his mother’s inclination, I insisted on waking him up, because putting it off — he wouldn’t be feeling well when he woke, he’d want a change, and he’d be hungry, all at once — would only intensify the fuss. Will is never more heartbreakingly adorable than when he tries to smile through his tears, as he did over and over again when roused from the long nap. The bottle provided some consolation, but between intakes what calmed his spirit was the view from the balcony.

For Will to have a view from the balcony, over my shoulder, meant that I spent a lot of time looking at the impatiens and geraniums that I potted up last week — not very interesting, really. I can’t say what Will was actually gazing at, but I expect that it was the moving traffic way down on 86th Street. I had the oddest memory of standing on the balcony with Megan, when we were still new to the apartment and she was visiting from Houston; odd because in this memory Megan was very taken by yellow cabs, by the color of them, which of course she never saw in Houston although she had some sort of taxi toy. What’s odd, of course, is that Megan was eleven years old when we moved into this apartment,  not seven or eight, which is how old she is in my memory of the taxi excitement. I’ve undoubtedly conflated two experiences. But I will never have to wonder how old Will was when he first peered down onto 86th Street, where the taxis are still slicker-yellow.

I did have this insufferably snobulesque fantasy the other night, sitting out on the balcony in the early evening. Looking off into Queens, I imagined reminding Will that Queens is Over There, but that he comes from Right Here, meaning Manhattan. Will and I are the only members of our immediate family to be able to make that claim. (Because Will’s parents actually lived on the island when he was born, his claim is even better than my more transient one.) But I feel it keenly. This hunk of deciduous granite is my true patrie, and I hope that Will will grow up to feel the same. We are both Sons of Otis — scions of the land of elevators.

This morning, I was Eve Harrington in New Haven: “I couldn’t possibly.” But if my day did not call forth the performance of a lifetime, it was not the discreditable heap that I dreaded in the runup to my trip downtown.  

We will all be happier, it is generally agreed, when Will learns how to crawl. He so clearly wants to get about on his own! At the moment, he is making great strides at the core competence of holding his own bottle. (It is very hard not to laugh at his misdirections, which showcase the complexity of organizing two limbs and one mouth in a common project.) Crawling will make our Will a free agent. I’m sure that we won’t miss the time when he more or less had to stay wherever we planted him.  

Until last week, I’d have said, Will was incapable of doing anything deliberately. That has changed only to the extent that what Will now does deliberately he does not do very well. We are in no hurry for him to develop; we know that he will get where he’s going in good time. But Will himself is in a terrible hurry. His good nature is all that protects him from crossly flailing tantrums. Such is life, at four months, for a curious little fellow.

Four months — is that all? Admit it: you thought he’d be off to college by now.

I was walkiing along First Avenue this afternoon, with Quatorze, when BAM! my head struck something. It was the transverse pole of some scaffolding that a group of turbaned South Asians were assembling — almost certainly in non-compliance with code. Angry as always when my head is struck, I forged on a few steps and BAM! it happened again. “Don’t you people have any brains?” I shouted at the silent men, who had done nothing to warn me as I blundered in their midst. Then I continued walking, but not without an upward glance to rule out further hazards.

For twenty minutes or so, my eyes felt a bit odd — just a bit, as if focusing them were a problem. But I don’t think that a trip to the hospital (quite close by, as it happened) would have been helpful.

It astonishes me that most people aren’t as tall as I am — something of an understatement. It seems grotesquely unfair that they’re not. I never think of being tall as an advantage, and I shouldn’t care to be any taller. If everyone stood to about seventy-five inches, that would be the end of many tight corners, and I’d find the world somewhat more accommodating. There’s something very handy about my height. Everybody ought to have it.

My mother, who was five-eight, used to exhort me to “go out and find a nice tall queen and make her happy.” My suppressed inward jeer at her ignorance of the popular meaning of “queen” masked, but was also prompted by, the irritation that anyone would feel by such erotic dictation. Of course my mother didn’t mean anything erotic. She was much too sentimental to give much thought to the particularity of love. She expected me to be content with a gallant’s role — that is what men were for. It took forever to outgrow the rather unnatural oafishness that I assumed in self-protection.

In the event, my abiding bond has been with a rather short woman, someone over a foot shorter than I am. She would certainly like to be as tall as I am; she has said so many times. But I’m afraid that if my dear Kathleen were as tall as I am, then I’d be expecting her to bring me tea and toast in the morning, instead of the other way round.  

When I came back into the apartment this afternoon, after having put Megan and Will in a taxi bound for their house, the place seemed abandoned, bereft. I’m not sure why this hasn’t happened before, on any of the other days that Megan has worked-from-home-from-my-house, but I’m not complaining, because it was really pretty painful for a minute or two.

My hunch is that Will has ceased to be an amazing, inexplicable miracle, and become a terrific little boy, and my grandson for real. But that can’t be all that there is to it, because I missed Megan as well. I suspect that if I have ever missed Megan in the past, I have surpressed the feeling, because one ought to want one’s child to go out into the world. Megan has certainly gone out into the world. But now she has come home — to her home. Her home is not in this apartment, certainly. But she carries a glow from her home wherever she goes, and it was that warmth that I missed when she took Will back down to the Lower East Side, and I was suddenly all by myself.