Before Kathleen came home, I was going to write about my terrible mood. But Kathleen’s terrible mood was a lot more interesting. After talking about what’s bothering her for an hour , I can’t summon any interest in what was bothering me, which was, of course, the impending travel.

But I can’t talk about Kathleen’s terrible mood, because of attorney-client and spousal privileges. Which is another way of saying that, even though I’m unhappy about the impending travel (to put it mildly), Kathleen’s terrible mood doesn’t have much, if anything, to do with me.

So I have to talk about my terrible mood after all. As it happens, the terrible mood that I’m in right now isn’t so much a funk about the travel — about being obliged to leave Manhattan Island, which is really great and all but which really happens to be just the place where I live, for a week — as it is about all the nice things that friends say —

• You lucky guy! A week in the warm Caribbean sun &c.
• Oh, stop! You’ll have a great time!
• Soldier on, as you always do.

That last one breaks me up, possibly because it captures the entire preposterousness of the travel. Be a man — relax and enjoy yourself. As I always do.

The friends who really know me say, “Kathleen needs you to go on this trip with her.” Which isn’t true, really. Kathleen is counting on my presence because she didn’t arrange for anyone else’s. In future she will. She has lots of friends (all women, please note), who would love to go with her to sunny places in cold months. She says this matter-of-factly because it is true. Kathleen has had many fine times with friends in the Caribbean. Unfortunately, she likes to get away from it all with me. I like getting away from it all with her, too, but it looks as though the getaways will have to be decoupled from any thought of Caribbean islands, or, indeed, any island other than the one that we’re already on. That’s why God made the Plaza Hotel, after all.

I don’t share Kathleen’s interest in bright sunlight. When we get  back from the travel, in fact, I’m having a second chunk of my head removed, lest it metastasize into lung cancer. It’s true that the damage was done during childhood. But I didn’t like being out of doors in those days, either. In those days, it was my mother’s wacky and unwelcome idea that the basement was less healthy than a ball field. I would blame her for my basal-cell woes, but she has already perished of lymphoma. A lot she knew.

Where we’re going is very nice, and the minute we get there it feels as though we’ve never been anywhere else. It’s a lovely resort. But I’m learning that dolce far niente only made sense to me when I was powered by martinis. Now that, in the interests of living long enough to teach my grandson bad French, I am trying to cut back on white wine, the whole idea of a week at a resort feels like an irreparably mildewed Cole Porter lyric. It’s my idea of nothing to do.

Kathleen used to say, “This is the last time I’m traveling with you anywhere, R J Keefe!” This time, I’m saying it. This is the last time I’m traveling with R J Keefe. From now on, R J Keefe is staying home. It is his one and only regular-guy trait, and he is sticking with it.

My next trip will be to the next world.

Will’s parents needed a bit of help late this afternoon, owing to the attack of a nasty flu bug that laid Ryan low and put Megan in the impossible position of not being able to do anything for her husband. I was called in. Lucky, lucky me.

I popped in a taxi, sped downtown, and scaled Château Gizmo. I washed my hands at every turn, and nothing else that I did was more remarkable than that. I ran a couple of errands and washed a few dishes.

Mostly, though, I sat like this, in the grandfatherly position known as “Cat & Canary.” The cat in this case is not going eat the canary, however, because holding it is too delightful.

I complimented Megan on having studied the major points of grandfatherly gratification. When I arrived, she was stressed, Will was wailing, and Ryan was cramped on an extra bed that he was too beleaguered to clear off. Within half an hour — well, Ryan was still feverish and miserable; there are limits to my magic powers. But Megan was contentedly feeding her contented son, and — what’s always essential in these crises, necessary if insufficient — the kitchen sink was cleared.

Although Will’s mouth is open in the photograph, he is as silent as the you-know-what. As zonked out as a sophomore.

Megan asked if I saw anything of myself in Will’s little face. I had to confess, with lingering surprise, that I wasn’t looking. I had certainly thought that I would. When Megan was Will’s age, I peered at her with narcissistic abandon. But I don’t seem to need any supplementary assurance that Will is my grandson. And that is sweet.

My latest resolution, which I have made several times now but not kept, is to refrain from commenting upon one of Eric Patton’s entries at Sore Afraid until I have actually written to him privately. This may put a stop to my comments altogether, but at least I’ll be free of that awful sticky teenaged feeling of having ventured an unappreciated witticism. Eric’s writing always makes me feel playful, but his subject matter makes me feel thoughtful. It’s a problematic blend, best bottled and shelved for a day or two.

As so often happens, it’s the obiter dicta that really caught my attention (even though I had the sense not to comment upon it). In passing, sharpening a point, Eric constructed the opposite of a so-called bucket list. “Puck-It” is, of course, a stand in for the name that I really have in mind; I refrain because I know — and delight in the fact — that many of my readers would be somewhat shocked and possibly offended if I headed an entry, in great big letters, “Fuck-It List.” Either way, such a list itemizes the things that one intends never to know more about than one already does, things that one rather wishes one didn’t know about at all, because they weren’t there to be known.

The subject of Eric’s entry is the variety of religious experience, historically considered, and, at an early point, he is forced to acknowledge that this is a variety in which, per se, many if not most people are uninterested. 

If I had a United States dollar for every time I heard or read “All religion is equally bad!” I would be able to afford a very nice dinner in one of the fine restaurants in the Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle, located on the southwestern corner of New York’s famed Central Park. 

Also, it’s much easier to simply reject anything that falls under the rubric of religion than to actually learn about the differences between religions or religious movements or about religious history and philosophy, and it seems more even-handed.  I have chosen to do the same for business, sport, finance, cooking, real estate, and most technology, although I am a fan of the wheel, fire, and several metals.

The presence of cooking on this list makes saddens me a bit — I can’t believe that Eric wouldn’t make a very good cook, and it’s the item that, in combination with the others, proclaims Eric as a serious male intellectual. But when I remember that Eric is usually generating laughter on one level or another, I stop worrying: he’s not that serious. Or, rather, is not serious like that.

I think about my own list, which definitely includes sport — and may I pause to say how pleased I was to find another American willing to adopt the English singular, which emphasizes the absence of varieties of athletic experience. I’m certainly squeamish about real estate, but I can’t, as a trained lawyer, claim to be unaware of the varieties of property ownership. Technology interests me hugely, as an extension of cognitive capability, but I suspect that Eric is talking about toys here; if so, I share the allergy. (This would include the universe of automobiles.) Where we differ most is on the matter of business. I used to feel that business was a soul-destroying activity, but when I realized that it was only soul-destroying for me (and a few others), I began to appreciate it as the force that really does make the world go round. I’m not talking about “capitalism” here. I’m talking about the kind of commerce in which the proprietor knows most of his customers by name. Not necessarily small business, by the way: J P Morgan knew most of his customers by name.

But I have awakened to the fact that finance — a daring and often dodgy variety of the banking experience — has nothing to do with business. Repeat this often. Nor does it have much to do with retail investment (college and retirement funds) or the varieties of insurable risk. Finance ought to be occasional, triumphant, and apotheothetical, its gods invoked from time to time for the subscription of grand public goals such as the Triborough Bridge or the Museum of Television and Radio. Everyday finance — the trading routine of Goldman Sachs — would be indefensible if it were more generally understood. And advertising is to creativity as finance is to business: parasitical and mindless. At best, it is catalytic, as vital as vitamin A, and as lethal in greater than small amounts.

I have another list, one that Eric’s too young for yet. It comprises things that I know a lot about, so much in fact that they’re no longer really interesting. I’m not sure (to pick a slight example) that I can ever read PG Wodehouse again. I can’t take the thing known as “conceptual art” much more seriously than the fabulous accomplishments of other people’s little children. I’m shocked by how little I miss having my own garden, and knowing the Latin name of every plant in it. I pray that I remain ignorant of war, that worst variety of religious experience.

In a few hours, Will O’Neill will be three weeks old. Next week, when I hope to see him for the third time, he’ll be four weeks old, but not yet a month. I expect that the counting in weeks will end when he’s three months old, and that counting in months will end sometime between his eighteenth and his twenty-fourth. From then until his early teens, half-years will be noted. There’s something self-contradictory about saying “thirteen and a half”; it sounds like the kind of puffing that cool kids don’t go in for.

So much is known of Will’s future, and not much more. He has not announced any plans so far, and his parents have nothing more definite (and limiting) than health and safety in mind for his coming years. When will intimations of his future begin to present themselves? Will we recognize them? These are open questions, too. Looking back on my own life, I see a complete break with childhood round about 1961. I stopped playing in the basement (I had already stopped playing with trains), and I started reading, preferably by candlelight. Beyond the odd Hardy Boys mystery, I hadn’t  been a reader; that changed with A Tale of Two Cities. I began singing, too, in the chorus at school, and almost instantly I knew all about Mozart and Vivaldi. Not to mention the Water Music, which provided the soundtrack for Dickens. Overnight, I became a pompous jerk. For the most part, I’ve spent the rest of my life filling in the pretentious gas of my own private Big Bang with material experience.

What also strikes me is the totality with which my new preoccupation with music, literature, and history — my abiding interests to this day — sublimated sexuality for me. Stendhal wrote that people wouldn’t fall in love if they didn’t read about it first, but even then, although I had a few monumental crushes that went nowhere (because, among other reasons, I was constituted like one of the denizens of Pleasantville), I didn’t think about making love, myself, in spite of reading rather a lot about it. Sex, like sports, was for other people. I’m quite sure that I should have grown up to be a forty year-old virgin if I had not, at some convenient point in my college career, been taken by the hand.

More important than sex, though, was the awakening that came on a day in 1974 or ’75, during my Houstonian exile. I was on the Westheimer bus, going one way or the other between work (Post Oak) and home (Montrose). I was reading Anthony Trollope’s An Autobiography. I don’t recall the passage, but it said the very same thing as Rilke’s archaic torso. It was time to stop being a shambolic solipsist. It was time to start being a gentleman. I felt like Adam and Eve being thrown out of Eden. But it wasn’t paradise that was taken away; it was only childhood. I cleaned up my act. I got myself through law school and into the New York Bar. 

After that, it was a simple matter of waiting for Al Gore to invent the Internet.

Will is only three weeks old, but, doubtless as a doting grandfather, I’m sure that it’s not going to take him to the end of his twenties to grow up. Whether or not Will knows what he wants to do with his life by the time he’s thirty is another matter altogether. If my experience is any guide, you can’t find out what you want to do with your life until you claim it as an adult; you can’t take real advantage of passing opportunities if you are not already conducting your affairs — and I don’t mean just checkbooks — with diligence and the conviction that what’s really interesting about life is going on all around you.

Although I had paid only the most glancing attention to the Massachusetts senatorial election, I can already see that I’ll be griping about politics for a while. Something about the Democratic Party fiasco popped a very fizzy cork.

When did it come to be said of Edith Wharton that she was too fashionable for Boston, and too intellectual for New York? Fashion and intellect having been the antipodal attributes of ladies in those times. The problem was complicated, I think, by Wharton’s rather severe physiognomy. She wasn’t ugly, but she was no pretty slip of a girl, either — ever. She grew more handsome as she got older, really; and by the time she was older she was a terror to younger women. Rich, published, admired by men of all ages and persuasions, thoroughly sophisticated, addicted to motor-cars, and capable of the most wonderful put-downs, Wharton was beyond the fashion-intellect divide once she settled in Paris (that, too!). She was Edith Wharton. A party of one.

That’s what I’ve been feeling like, lately. I’m too smart for the conservatives but too gracious for the progressives. I get along very well with conservatives, as long as we don’t talk about anything important, but progressives, notwithstanding the fact that I agree with them on everything that’s important, give me a rash. Meanwhile, I am a traitor to my class. (So was FDR, but let’s not be grandiose.)

Have you heard that story about Wharton in the Berkshires? She was visiting a neighboring monstrosity, and the hostess drew her into a furiously overly-upholstered chamber. “I call this the “French” room,” purred the chatelaine naively. “But my dear,” replied Wharton, feigning confusion (or perhaps not), “why?”

That was the only thing that I could think of to say when the best that the Massachusetts Democrats presented Martha Coakley and said, “We think of her as a Kennedy.” Who are these uncouth Democrats? They can’t hold a fork, they hardly know how to shake hands while looking you in the eye, and they say “No problem” instead of “You’re welcome.” In short: their manners are either ill-considered or rustic. Why are they the people who believe in all the right causes?

I’ve wondered about this all my life. I grew up in a town of virtual lobotomees, a village that still rivals anywhere in Texas in passion for sports talk. Why did they have all the money? Why does having a brain actually prevent the acquisition of wealth? Oh, I know the answer to that one, too.

People who make a lot of money are usually very smart indeed, but in a highly focused way that no genuinely intelligent person would acknowledge. My code word for Wall Street brilliance is “shrewd.” I believe that “shrewd” used to be a coded insult directed at Jews, which I mention because I don’t mean it that way myself. The town I grew up in, where nobody would sell a house to a Jew (in those days), was full of very shrewd people. The shrewd person is preternaturally gifted at looking out for Number One. You can’t say anything against it, except that it’s despicable, and that it gives intelligence a bad name.

People who believe in good causes fall into two groups. The first group is made up of the intelligent siblings of shrewd people. Intense loathing for shrewdness of any kind often tempts these good folk into looking out for everyone but Number One, which — paradoxically? — is not only not shrewd but not intelligent, either. Running away from your trust fund to join a commune in Asia, only to discover an immitigable aversion to dirty fingernails, isn’t, in the end, very bright. Eventually, these people come to terms with their lot, but their guilt is oppressive and their intelligence sicklied o’er.

The other group consists of meritocrats. It would be nice if meritocrats always said “thank you” to the social institutions that lifted them out of their native narrow confines, but very few do. Most are determined to insist that, compared to the siblings of the shrewd, the latter enjoy no serious advantages. A young man who plows through Harvard on a much-needed scholarship may fancy himself not only smarter but better-endowed than the roommate who, although equally bright, descends from generations of Yard Men. If the roommate is a shrewd operator, this is true. But the sibling of a shrewd operator will know a lot more than the meritocrat about putting people at ease and making them proud of what they do, whether they’re deans or dishwashers. Meritocrats have an unfortunate knack of making everyone feel miserable — or at least shabby — about everything.

There you have it, and the solution is obvious. We must all move to Paris.

I have just read Jessica Michael Hecht’s much talked-about entry forbidding suicide. It’s a good thing that I didn’t happen to read it in the middle of a funk when I was half as old as I am now, because it would have decided me to “be a man” and put an end to myself. The very possibility of staying alive in honor of Ms Hecht’s ultimatum would have been so humiliating that there would have been only one way to make sure that I wasn’t.

I’ve outgrown the impulse to kill myself that began to make itself felt during adolescence. That’s not to say that I can’t imagine killing myself now. But the deed would be a rational response to illness or poverty. (I would not permit myself to live in the world of Cormac McCarthy’s road — and I think that the man is despicable, really, for having permitted himself to imagine it, a genuine misanthrope whom we’d all be better off without.) I do not have the whole of my life ahead of me. But I would not kill myself because I could no longer bear to feel totally alone and misunderstood. My dear wife has made it hard for me to imagine being totally alone (even if she weren’t here), and, as for being misunderstood, I now grasp that this is a condition that invariably begins with not understanding oneself.

These are lessons of old age, however, and of long companionship. They are lessons that nobody can expect to have learned before the age of fifty.

I’m thinking of David Foster Wallace. Right now, it’s as though Shakespeare had killed himself in the mid 1590s. One imagines the things that Wallace would have written had he lived — or, to put it more correctly, one imagines one’s delight at his brilliant surprises. He was a Wernher von Braun of English syntax; there was nothing about our crabbed language that obstructed his ability to send it aloft. Had he lived, he would have taught us to speak English as grandly as Shakespeare taught us to speak an earlier version centuries ago, a version that, but for him, would have slipped into sheer unintellibility over a century ago.

But I never get mad at David Foster Wallace for taking his own life. I’ve lived with clinical depression, and with the dissatisfactions that anti-depressent splatter all over life, and I know that minds really can close down. Nobody has the right to tell David Foster Wallace that he can’t kill himself.

Ms Hecht writes:

Anyway, some part of you doesn’t want to end it all, and I’m talking to her or him, to that part of you.  I’m throwing you a rope, you don’t have to explain it to the monster in you, just tell the monster it can do whatever it wants, but not that.  Later we’ll get rid of the monster, for now just hang on to the rope.

To which I can only say that, for any potential suicide to whom she might address this injunction, she herself is the monster. Not for wanting to prevent a suicide, not for intervening, but for being too far away and yet too noisy, for being unjustifiably warm and loving. I don’t know the first thing about Rachel Wetzsteon or Sarah Hannah, Ms Hecht’s sometime fellow students at Columbia, and I don’t really know anything about the personal life of David Foster Wallace, but I’m willing to venture that they faced hard impossibilities that, however transitory, were as fatal as a momentary spike in blood pressure or a momentary drop in breathable air.

For all the entry’s well-meant appeal, I believe that Ms Hecht owes her late friends an apology.

Sorry about last night — no Dear Diary. There’s a reason, and it’s called night-time. I am too old to be writing after dark; all I can think about is me, which is not a very interesting topic. To me, anyway — and last night, in a New Year’s burst of candor, I couldn’t be bothered to try. I know that I’m going to have to swim very hard against the tide of everyday life if I’m going to write up what I’ve been thinking about (not me) during the day-time, preferably in the morning.

The only reason I’m up now is the reason why I’m writing. I want to make a note of something sweet. The new neighbor across the hall, approaching me in stages too delicate to recapitulate, asked to borrow a chair. A chair! She and her husband are giving their first dinner party, and they were short one chair. Although we’re not exactly stocked with the sort of chair that you just lend out, I couldn’t say no. “When you’re through with it,” I said, “just knock — we’ll be home.” Kathleen is of the opinion that they’ll think that their party has broken up too late to disturb us, and that we’ll get the chair back tomorrow.

When I stuck my head into the hallway a few minutes ago, the party was still going strong. It’s a dinner party, definitely — just a few voices, not the babble of a party party. But a good times is being had by all.

Doubtless because my loan was one of our Eddie Monsoon chairs.

At the café where we had dinner this evening, the proprietor was watching a Berlusconi spettacolo on RAI, heaven only knows why. Then the scene changed, and a lot of blacks were surrounded by ruins. “Is that Rosarno?” I asked, alluding to the race-riots that erupted in southern Italy a few days ago. I am so slow. It takes a full day for me to register news.

Kathleen and I have long felt that the entire population of Haiti ought to be taken into a witness protection program in some economically sounder environment — almost anywhere, in other words. I wouldn’t object to Haitians coming en masse to the United States, if they wished. If there was ever a polity that needed a time out, Haiti’s it.

Does anyone else remember Kissinger calling Aristide a “psychopath” on Charlie Rose? (I was still watching the odd evening show in those days.) Imagine trying to get to the bottom of that! With help from Christopher Hitchens, bien sûr!

On Sunday, I rented two film titles that seem to go together in my mind, and discovered that I’m  not the only one: on each DVD, the final preview before the feature is the other movie.

It was only when I watched these movies that I remembered why I wanted to see them again. Junebug: Amy Adams and Alessandro Nivola. I don’t think that I knew who either of them were when I saw Junebug the first time. Thumbsucker: Tilda Swinton and Walter Kirn. Walter Kirn isn’t in Thumbsucker, of course; he wrote the novel on which it is based. (He is in Up in the Air, though, even though he’s not credited — I’m sure that he is! I’m probably wrong, though, since IMDb never misses these things. What’s this? Walter Kirn is in Thumbsucker. But that’s not why I wanted to see it.)

I remembered the atmosphere of Junebug fairly well, but I wasn’t sure that I’d seen Thumbsucker before until it started — the old names-and-faces problem.

Considering the number of DVDs that I own, and the rashness with which I acquire new ones, it might seem odd that neither of these pictures is in my library. It didn’t seem odd to me though, as I sat through them a second time. Thumbsucker is something of a bad dream, and Junebug is a nightmare.

Thumbsucker begins, for me, when Justin (Lou Pucci) gets the acceptance letter from NYU. It ends about five minutes later, with the credits. Most of the film is an exercise in throat-clearing, and that seems to be the point: isn’t America’s throat interesting? And isn’t Oregon beautiful! Although I like almost everyone in the very strong cast, nobody does much of anything that’s interesting. (Tilda Swinton is interesting just sitting in a chair, but she’s so much more exciting in The Deep End that the unavoidable comparison makes Thumbsucker seem very flat.) Poor Lou Pucci, with that lanky hair, bears an unsettling resemblance to Tippy Walker, the poor little rich girl in The World of Henry Orient.

Junebug also has a very strong cast, but it’s also put to great use. Amy Adams, Celia Weston, Alessandro Nivola — all wonderful. Embeth Davidtz is really luminous as the international sophisticate (“I was born in Japan.”) for whom central North Carolina is just another exotic location. I missed this the first time. I imagined that her character, Madeleine couldn’t stand being in her new husband’s family home, and must be dying to get back to Chicago. But Madeleine has seen stranger places, and she knows how to take a deep breath, somehow assured that she’ll be home soon enough. I must think of her the next time I’m in an unaccustomed setting. (It won’t do any good; I’m massively uncomfortable wherever I can’t speak freely.)

But the Junebug act that fascinated me earlier this evening was Ben McKenzie. I have no idea why. His character, Johnny Johnsten, is nasty little cracker in the making, an overflowing toilet of sullen resentment and off-loaded blame. He has made his mind up to be defeated, and at some point this will make him dangerous. How Mr McKenzie managed to make Johnny cutely pathetic and warmly funny, I have no idea. Perhaps he reminded me of someone I knew in Texas.

And then there was that hymn, “Come Home,” that Mr Nivola’s character is persuaded to sing at a church supper. This time, I got the hymn, too.

It’s a relief, really, being back at work. Another week off, and I might have been tempted to stop blogging altogether, and that would have been annoying. The thinking about it. Thinking in the wrong direction. Also: in another week, the forgetting-how-to-do-this, the slippage from memory of everyday, nuts-and-bolts routines, might have become really serious.

***

I worried that a meaty story would break while I was “on vacation” — actually, up to my proverbials in other jobs —  but that didn’t happen. Of all the things that I read during the three weeks away from the Daily Office templates, a passage from Sore Afraid made the deepest impression, but I knew that I could come back to it, as indeed I am. It appears in an entry datelined Christmas Eve.

The holiday season reminds me about the prevailing worldview of most of my counterparts in non-heterosexual New York, and maybe even for me: the purpose of life is to collect as many fun experiences as possible, before death.  I realize that this is a bit of an exaggeration, but, for most people I know, it’s more or less the case.  The person who dies having played with the most toys wins!  Of course, people with children have a different orientation: the purpose of life is to do everything possible to ensure a good life for the children.  People with children are generally willing to make great sacrifices for them, although I think that the kind of good life they are trying to ensure for their children is more-or-less the same thing: a collection of fun experiences.

I’ve had these thoughts myself, often, but never all at once, and never with Eric Patton’s concision. My entire worldly ambition has been to avoid living a life that could be described as “a collection of fun experiences.” But I have nothing particularly sharp to say about the alternatives. There’s the “meaningful life,” of course; but the meaningful life, by definition, requires a more or less clear sense of meaning, whether religious or secular. The older I get, the more wilful and imaginary such meanings come to seem.

Whether or not Eric intended it, I read into “a collection of fun experiences” the implication that the person accumulating the fun belongs to a community that validates it. Even if the community is vanishingly small. I know, for example, that Eric and I enjoy foreign languages, and that we find it “fun” (for want to an excuse to look for a better word) to spend hours with grammars and lexicons.( Or would if we had the hours to spare.) Most of my friends, certainly, do not share this interest, and I suspect that the same is true for Eric — but we can form a community of two, if need be; so that when Eric wishes me “Happy Birthday, Grandpa” in Nederlands, it’s definitely a fun experience for me. At the right time, such a gesture can altogether make my day. But just because it’s less expensive and more educational than a week on the Riviera doesn’t make it more important or even, necessarily, more personal.

In other words, I try not to kid myself about the quality of my entertainments. I do flatter myself that they are more entertaining to me, though. I have given pleasure a great deal of close attention — it’s in my nature to bestow close attention on anything that I don’t simply ignore — and I have never had much of a problem resisting the pleasures of others. The Internet, moreover, has made it possible to expect to find other people whose ideas about pleasure have roughly the same contours as mine. As a result of all this, I don’t wonder if I’m missing out on something, and I’m not beset by the nagging fear that “this is all that there is.” Although I get tired quite easily, the world itself grows more inexhaustible every day.

I’m almost certain — I haven’t been thinking about it for very long — that the part ef each of that dies and deconposes and quits the earth (whether for another destination or not) is the least important part of us. To the extent that we’re remembered with a smile, our collections of fun experiences don’t dwindle to ash, whatever they may have been. 

What a difference a day makes &c. I was practically a W-O-M-A-N today. (Sing it, Maria!) And yet it wasn’t that I got so much done as that I attended to so many different things, one of which was finishing The Kiss Murder, Mehmet Murat Somer’s “detective novel” starring an Audrey-Hepburn-like drag queen who’s also a gifted kick-boxer, a veritable Jackie Chan in YSL. In Istanbul, did I mention.

PLUS! PLUS! PLUS! I fixed the dishwasher. Me, moi! All by myself.

Okay, no plumbing was involved. What had happened — a fit of pique. The sort of thing that happens only when I’m really too tired to be in the kitchen. Sure, I’d floated through the evening on a sea of Sancerre and Champagne, but intoxication was not the culprit. I wasn’t so much a drunk as an overtired three year-old. If you’ve been around an overtired three year-old lately, you know that it is easier to plug a volcano with your index finger than to quiet a toddler who has gotten stuck in the phase change between wakefulness and sleep. (Cue the streaky Star Trek effects!) That was me on Wednesday night. I gave the middle rack of the dishwasher a yank. No doubt I meant to punish it by forcibly evicting it from the dishwasher. In this I was successful. How to put it back, though….

Only when all the dishes and whatnot of the not-a-birthday party had been washed (on the bottom rack; the dishwasher continued to work just fine, at half capacity) did I figure out how to fix the thing. As you can imagine, what was missing after the defenestration was whatever it was that kept the middle rack from rolling on indefinitely, right off the retractable rails. What in model railroading was called a “buffer” — the things at the end of the track at Washington’s Union Station that will keep a locomotive from ploughing into the passengers. I new that I was missing the dishwasher’s objective correlative of these stoppers, but I had no idea what it looked like. Until I chanced to see the upper rack, the very shallow shelf for silver (this is a Miele we’re talking about; none of those ground-floor silverware baskets here!). At the end of each retractable rail, there was a little plastic plug. Aha! I was looking for two items. What did they look like? And — in a miracle of modern cognition — no sooner did I realize that I was looking for two plastic plugs (as opposed to the band of aluminum that I’d imagined) than they both appeared! Unbroken! Plugged into place, they did their job, although the trauma of ejection had weakened the grip of the join on the right. So I fastened both plugs with twist-ties.

Wasn’t that fascinating?

Having shared all of this wonderful news, I find that I have no energy at all for a discussion of Los Abrazos Rotos, the new Almodóvar film. I saw it late this afternoon — something else that I did today that wasn’t exactly taxing. All I’ll say now is that Penélope Cruz has never been more ravishing. Her brilliant smile eats up the screen with the gusto of Audrey Hepburn — or Katharine, if you prefer.

Kathleen will be leaving for Florida in the morning, even though the weather there is supposed to be worse for Florida than what we’re going to have is for New York. I’ve sent her off with a last supper of some of my best dishes: tomato soup, grilled lamb chops, steamed baby asparagus and roast new potatoes. A Hepburn sort 0f menu, when you think about it.

Last night, I very nearly brought the holidays to a train-wreck finale. Realizing that I was running out of steam, I pressed ahead with the production of a demoralizingly sub- par dinner for six. Then, instead of sensibly retiring when Kathleen and Fossil Darling left the table — Kathleen to work in the bedroom, Fossil to get to bed on a school night — I vivaciously engaged in a provocative conversation with M le Neveu about Roman Polanski. Kathleen had to break it up, it was so provocative. Then I broke the dishwasher.

Worst of all, I awoke feeling flu-ish. I was on the edge and I wished to stop there. So we did the decent thing and canceled this evening’s dinner reservation at La Grenouille first thing.

There was a bit of misapprehension among the dinner guests: it was thought that I was giving myself a birthday dinner. This made a lot of sense, since I was giving a dinner and it was my birthday. But this was a coincidence. M le Neveu was in town, and Wednesday night was the only time that we could all get together. On top of the coincidence, I piled some rather unwise decisions about the menu (see below) — startlingly unwise decisions, in retrospect. Keep-this-man-out-of-the-kitchen unwise. I can reconstruct “what I was thinking,” but I can’t justify it without recourse to the very fatigue that sapped most pleasure and a good deal of flavor from the event, at least for me, after everyone had left, and I couldn’t figure out what I’d done to the dishwasher.

At least I didn’t sit up berating myself for having failed at life &c. Well, all right, I did berate myself a bit. But I was too tired to keep it up for very long.

I did stay in bed all day today, dozing, or sat in my reading chair. No music, nor even a mug of tea (until just now). Just a lot of ice water and the occasional snack. I read two books, Lauren Grodstein’s A Friend of the Family and Lynn Barber’s An Education. Both are super books. I cleaned up a bit of last night’s debris. Eventually, I made the bed. Gradually, the morning’s mood of complicated, anguished fatigue shaded into plain fatigue.

I have been writing a lot about fatigue in the past few months (so it seems; I may have been at it far longer), and I’m beginning to find the topic boring. I know why I write about it: I keep hoping that I’ll find some way around it, some brilliant plan for the conservation of energy. But even if I do, it’s not going to be through meditations here.

¶ Memoirs of a Cracked Cook

What I was thinking: last Wednesday, I bought a whole tenderloin at Agata & Valentina. I like to have one in the freezer because it’s so easy to slice off pieces thick or thin for various dishes — Filet with blue cheese, for example. I thought — this was the first mistake — that Beef Stroganoff would make an elegant New Year’s Eve supper for the two of us. As indeed it would have done. But I haven’t made frites in a while (certainly not in the kitchen itself; the friteuse spent the warm months out on the balcony), and Stroganoff, easy-sounding at four days’ remove, became rather daunting up close. In any case, the mood of this holiday season was, decidedly: take it easy. So we didn’t have much of anything special on New Year’s Eve. At some point, over the weekend, we had a supper of Sicilian salami, assorted cheeses, and the New Year’s Eve caviar, with a bottle of champagne. The tenderloin remained in the freezer, and my itch to make Stroganoff remained dangerously unrelieved.

Because I’m a dead-tired fool (there is no other explanation), I latched on to the notion that Beef Stroganoff would be the perfect entrée for the somewhat impromptu dinner party. The idiocy of this idea is only intensified by the fact that I’ve never made the dish for more than four people at a time. To do it properly for six (as I learned) would require at least two skillets, side by side; no single pan would ever be large enough to brown the meat properly. So there was that.

Then the friteuse acted up. Or, rather, it turned out that I still don’t know how to use it. It’s the third DeLonghi deep-fryer that I’ve owned, and my least favorite by far. It has an elaborate time-and-temperature setting protocol that is, let’s just say, inflexible.

And did I mention dinner rolls? I’ve been wanting to make dinner rolls for ages, and last night I did. But I started them a bit too early in the afternoon. Something that has never happened before happened: the second rising was so prolonged that the carefully weighed and shaped balls of dough coalesced into an enormous blob.

I will spare you the Caesar frolics. But I’ll note that all the salad plates were clean. 

Golly, isn’t it still somebody else’s birthday?

I was awfully down in the dumps this afternoon, but two things happened. First, I bought Lauren Grodstein’s A Friend of the Family. On the basis of Joanna Smith Rakoff’s review in the Book Review (last week’s), I expected the novel to re-ignite my flagging interest in fiction. And that is exactly what it has done. I’m writing this in the wee smalls because I haven’t been able to put the book down.

The other thing that happened was the realization that, when I’m tired, I feel sorry not so much for myself as for my wounded vanity. It’s as though my vanity were a pet in distress — and I can’t think how I’ll keep the poor beast alive. A lifetime’s flirtations with suicide (and I do mean flirtations) suddenly made sense. I snapped out of my sulk.

I snapped out my sulk despite the following chronicle-of-a-death-foretold bit from the novel that is re-igniting my interest in fiction even as it persuades me that “re-ignition” is a short-term concept. (The narrator of A Friend of the Family is an internist practicing medicine in a fictionalized Tenafly, across the river.)

You are who you are at fifty-three, and even if the person you are is lucky and happy, the crush of it — the kneecapping crush of it — is that anyway it’s too late. My fifty-three-year-old overweight diabetics would die of stroke in fifteen years; my fifty-three-year-old hypersensitive, sedentary middle managers would die of kidney failure. They would not lose weight, they would not start to exercise, they might not even remember to take their meds. They were fifty-three; they were who they were. And as so many doctors before me have noted, it’s often easier to die than to change.

And if the effing doctors would only bestir themselves to make emergency rooms less ghastly, it might be pleasant as well as easy. 

Happy birthday from Who I Am.

This afternoon, I was reading the new issue of the London Review of Books, saving Alan Bennett’s Diary for later. Too lazy to get up, I turned the pages and settled on Anne Enright’s postcard from Recession Ireland, “Sinking by Inches.”

In the middle of 2007 a Romanian taxi driver told me he was going home to Bucharest because ‘the building site is dead.’ All his friends had already gone. He had a wife with a new baby (called Seán, as I remember), and this was why he would be the last to leave. I don’t know why nobody listened to this guy, or how we failed to understand what he was saying. In May 2007, the pre-election rhetoric dealt with worries about the economy, and each party, very helpfully, promised an increase in public spending. By summer the property market had sighed to a halt, a fact no one wanted to notice. A year later, Lehman Brothers fell, and this was so clearly not Ireland’s fault that the brief opportunity to talk about what was actually our fault was lost. I can understand the denial at the end of the boom; what worries me is the denial that made it. From 2001 to 2007 it was not possible to be off-message about the Irish economy or, especially, about the housing market. You would barely be published. Your article would end up in the middle of the supplement, unflagged.

As the publisher of a Web log that few people read, I didn’t have that problem. By the time The Daily Blague was even launched, I’d been posting “Friday Fronts” at Portico, many of which expressed discomfort with the financial laissez-faire that would lead to the Big Bust of 2008. I was reading well-publicized writers such as Paul Krugman and nodding my head, really. Kathleen and I had groaned heavily about the repeal of Glass-Steagall, in 1998; we thought that Sandy Weill was building a house of cards.

And we were right. But what’s the use of that? What good did it do Paul Krugman? Of course his reputation was burnished by the fall of Bear Stearns, and the fall of Lehman Brothers, and the near-collapse of AIG. Fine. I’m sure that he’d have preferred effectiveness to glory. If the people controlling the levers of power had listened to him, then —

Instead, against all the odds that  common sense could call, Lawrence Summers and his satellites (Rubin, Geithner, and Bernanke) shine brightly in White House thinking. One wishes that Jacques Necker could rise from his grave and deliver a second compte rendu.

Perhaps you know what I mean by that. I have no idea whether most readers of this site can be expected to know about Jacques Necker and his Compte rendu au roi. (Thank heaven for Wikipedia in this regard! It spares me a lot of clunky and, in the event, unnecessary exposition.) And I’m not sure that a second accounting would be any more helpful than the first one was. The smart folks in 1780s France simply weren’t ready to hear what Necker had to say. Ditto Wall Street in the past decade — even in the flotsammy wake of Enron.

Sadly, I haven’t got any brilliant insights to trumpet. If anything, the Noughts taught me how dangerous the 20-80 curve is now that the Internet allows everyone to see it. You want to be where the action is, right? You want to be excited by the guy with the mike — and why not? There’s an app for that, and it has been processing the messy organic-chemistry equivalents of bits and bytes in our older brain structures for far longer than we’ve been human. The Noughts taught me that environmental catastrophe, awful and likely as it is, has nothing on the engines of brilliant stupidity that every day confute the ancients’ belief in our nature as rational animals.

My resolution for this the first year of my infant grandson’s life: Think twice about being cool. Keep on thinking.

My favorite taken-by-me photograph of 2009. Happy New Year, you guys!

One thing I cannot do: take flashless photographs in the dark. I lack the steady hand. Especially at the end of a party. I offer the above as a tribute to Francis Bacon. And to two great hams.

Let’s see: what happened today? I never made the bed. That never happens unless Kathleen is sick. She wasn’t today, but she didn’t get up until I’d gone to the doctor. I had two appointments — TMI stuff. One of them, really, is so richly TMI that I am sorely tempted to share. Which reminds me, did I ever tell you about the time that Kathleen and I walked into a hotel room, and Kathleen cooed approvingly over the little bronze plaque on her bedside table? “Thank You For Not Sharing,” she said. That’s not what the sign said, but it’s a nice thought. The only way to explain Kathleen’s misreading of “smoking” is wishful thinking.

Then lunch at the Hi Life, followed by an expedition to Agata & Valentina so expensive that I walked out with two tote bags. I wasn’t, strictly, entitled to the second one; the caviar for tomorrow night didn’t quite add up to the threshold. But the other stuff, which I’d put on American Express, more than made up the deficit. I had intended to buy just enough filet mignon to make Beef Stroganoff for the two of us tomorrow night. But Arthur had to make up an entire tenderloin, so, in the holiday spirit, I bought the entire tenderloin.

Back at the building, only one elevator was really working. You don’t want to hear about that, even though my ejaculations elicited some very choice gossip. Risking false imprisonment, I went out again, this time to Gristedes (for the boring stuff, which nonetheless added up impressively) and to Duane Reade (for TMI ointment — c’mon, you’re dying to know. We could play Hangman.) It wasn’t even two o’clock when I came home the second time. License to fritter!

Actually, I did a lot of putting away. Plus, I made madeleines. I wanted to send something to the troops at Kathleen’s office for New Year’s Eve. I understand that pirañas cannot consume a man’s big toe in the time that it takes associates, paralegals, and the odd partner to devour a plate of my madeleines. It’s not the pretty picture that Proust had in mind when he reminisced so famously, but that’s the literary life for you. The cool thing about madeleines now is that I still have the tins that my mother brought back from a trip to France in the Early Seventies, when Making Madeleines was one of those utterly unheard of things that I thought it would be cool to do. I was so far ahead of the crowd that, by the time the lovely little cookie-cakes caught on here (to the extent that they did), I wouldn’t have been caught dead baking a dozen. But I still have the tins, and they turn out very elegant madeleines. Not those big rubbery monstrosities that, par exemple, you can buy in cellophane wrappers from Entenman’s.

Needless to say, I have experimented with a wide range of inauthentic madeleine flavorings. There are many interesting almond variations, but in my dotage I have settled on microplaned lemon zest. Ah, the literary life!

Speaking of which, I wrote up the last two “stories” to appear in The New Yorker. I’m particularly pleased with this, I like to think uncharacteristically dismissive, penultimate line:

Only at the end, when the story collapses into silly misunderstanding faster than a soufflé on a trampoline, does a sense of the second-rate impinge.

The “soufflé on a trampoline” is one of those indulgences that I rarely permit myself. The parallelism is very deficient. But I adore the image. I almost want to rent a trampoline and try it out.

Then Kathleen came home, and we shared a dinner of tomato soup (time to make some more!), lamb chops, sautéed corn, rice, and chocolate chip cookies. I did the washing-up, and here I am, just minutes ahead of this entry’s scheduled entry’s publication.

Almost forgot! I did not run over to Crawford Doyle to pick up a copy (if they had one) of Lauren Grodstein’s A Friend of the Family. I wanted to, though.

Vacation really agrees with me! Hey! How was your day?

There isn’t really any snow out there anymore — it’s too cold for snow — but I haven’t had a chance to take any pictures. Outside the apartment, that is. These banner photos of mine are often pretty awful, but they’re no worse than the visual “thought for the day” that they’re intended to be. Meditate upon slush.

Was yesterday the first day of my vacation, or today? Yesterday was spent mostly cleaning up. So it must have been today. I celebrated by working. I read a mountain of feeds, wrote a few letters, read a learned chapter, reviewed the Book Review, wrote up A Single Man — I used to place links to these productions here, but I’m getting sniffy: if you’re not looking at Portico, then Never Mind. I made a ragù bolognese without having to leave the building, and it was delicious, although it might have been a teeny bit better if I’d thought to use olive oil instead of canola oil. I’m out of canola oil, so I used peanut oil. I dislike olive oil. What can I say? I don’t dislike olive oil nearly as much as I dislike Moby-Dick, but if neither existed then that would be two fewer things to complain about other folks’ liking.

I had a fantasy of knocking off Moby-Dick this week. It’s not going to happen. If it doesn’t happen by the end of January, I promise to give my Library of America copy to someone who would like to have it; I’ve no right to it. I have hated almost every line of the book, hated Melville’s writing. I don’t think that he could write a proper thank-you note, much less a novel. His thinking is the worst mish-mash of bad pseudo-science and King James pabulum imaginable. If this is the Great American Novel, then I’m righter than I think I am about the destinies of the American polity. I do promise that, as soon as I have done with Moby-Dick, one way or the other, I shall never mention it again. They talk of the “Scottish Play.” I’ll refer to the “Nantucket Novel.”

Although there’s a mountain of cleaning-up to do, what I’d really like, tomorrow, is to write thank-you notes to the wonderful people who came to the party.

I had a blast — which undoubtedly means that there are at least ten New Yorkers who are thinking of never speaking to me again. (Aside from Fossil Darling.)

The absolutely coolest thing that happened — well, modesty forbids &c. But I can say, happily, that it involved those lovely little green- and red-jacketed volumes, the Loeb Classics. I quite felt that we were standing upon a peak in Darien.

Here’s hoping that I can still walk tomorrow. My legs are horribly stiff. It hurts a bit to bend them when I sit, but I’m sure that the problem springs from my having stood in the kitchen for hours on end for three days. Let’s hope so. If I’m not a hypochondriac, it’s only because (a) I don’t deserve to survive the insults to my body that have been the hallmark of my lifestyle and (b) I never fear being ill. It’s sudden death that I can feel approaching.

Speaking of sudden death, I walked into the blue room about twenty minutes ago to find that this computer had shut down. It took a while to remember the flickering  of the lights in the kitchen not much earlier. Lights don’t flicker here, so I didn’t really pay attention.

Now that I’ve peeled myself off the ceiling, I have to admit that I’m crazy to think that I’m ready to receive friends and relations tomorrow. (Mostly friends.) But there is really nothing more to cook. I wish that it were a little colder (and drier) outside; I fear for the mousses on the balcony.

But the elephant in the room — the elephant in the room is the ghost of an elephant. It is the space that my ambition as a giver of parties used to occupy. I’m looking forward to seeing everyone who visits tomorrow, but if the rain washes my preparations away, I’ll just pop a lot of corn.

I only wish that I felt so relaxed about the electricity. I don’t feature life in a world without that. 

All the best wishes from our house to yours!

But wait — this is our house? It looks like a hand-tinted postcard from the early days of electric lighting! All that I wanted to do (thank you, PhotoShop) was to turn down the glare of the lampshades. As a result, the “window treatment” looks even more pathetic than usual — it’s so visible!; I see it through Edith Wharton’s eyes. If it were not bolted to the ceiling, I would be in the living room now, tearing it down, instead of doing whatever it is that I am doing. 

As you can see (yes?), we have not “decorated for the holidays.” In a Where’s-Waldo sort of way, there’s a wreath, but it’s too small to fuss with. So it hangs like a Puritan reproof in an orchard of furbelows.

What has become very interesting about this room for me, since I noticed it the other day, is how little of it Kathleen and I purchased. Almost everything of any size, except for the glass-topped table, the secretary desk, and the (almost invisible) bookshelf/mantelpiece, was either inherited or acquired at no cost. (Fossil realized that he hated the alabaster lamps on the right. My grandmother stitched the needlpoint bellpull, hanging just beyond the farther lamp, for cousins whose eldest daughter, no longer in need of such an appliance, gave it to me.) Kathleen doesn’t think that our way of coming into things is interesting at all. When I pointed it out to her, she called it “the East Coast way.”

I’m not going to pretend that I don’t care what the apartment looks like, but I have to say that I’ve never cared as little about it as I do now. I don’t post today’s image because I want to show off; on the contrary, I really am rather ashamed of all those (very dirty) draperies, not to mention the window treatment (that door!). But: this is home, and I’ve never cared more about that. What the picture shows is a lot of furniture, but what I hear are all the friends who have laughed on the sofas, and joked over the dinner. To all of you who have been with us in this room, I say: thanks for the memories!

And I think of the déja vu, for once bankably genuine, that was experienced by a blogging friend who visited the apartment for the first time a few weeks ago. “As photographed…” he said.

But was it?