What made the capon so flavorful and succulent? Could it have been the inedible stuffing?

But was the stuffing — a mixture of chopped apples, chopped prunes, sauerkraut, and breadcrumbs — inedible? I forgot to scoop it out of the bird and serve it. My father-in-law, who gave me the idea, told me that he made it to stuff a goose, back in the Sixties (my father-in-law’s gustatory memory is prodigious). It wasn’t meant to be eaten, he told me. It was intended to flavor the bird, and to soak up some of the fat. When Kathlenn told him how moist the capon was, he attributed it to the sauerkraut, which steams the breast from within.

That makes sense. By the time the sauerkraut would have begun to steam, the skin, which I scrupulously basted every twenty minutes, was crisping nicely into impermeability. Finally, a stuffing to stick with! Perhaps even to eat, if I remember it.

My attention was distracted by the green-bean casserole. For years, I have wanted to recreate this yummy concoction of green beans, almonds, canned onion rings and Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup, without resorting to the mushroom soup. Yesterday, while checking out another recipe in The Way to Cook, I came across the perfect replacement, a mushroom sauce made of béchamel and duxelles. But of course!

The resulting dish (I omitted the almonds, because nuts don’t agree with everyone) was a success. At least, I thought it was. But I can see why it has dropped off menus as cooking standards have improved. Making that mushroom sauce took a while. The mushrooms had to be chopped very fine (boring!), and the milk had to boil just so. It was obviously something that ought to have been done in ahead of time. Memo to Self &c.

Completing the main course were staples of my kitchen: sautéed corn and roasted sweet potatos. The corn is seasoned with oregano and cooked in spoonfuls of butter and oil. I cut five or six sweet potatoes into chunks (bigger than bite-size) and put them in a very large bowl. After tossing them with oil, red wine vinegar, honey, and a liberal amount of crushed rosemary. I turn them into a large baking dish. Whenever I baste the bird, I turn the chunks with a spoon. They’re done in about seventy-five minutes.

Ordinarily, I serve a cream of chestnut soup that New York chef Anne Rosenzweig published on the last page of a Sunday Times Magazine a thousand years ago.  But one of our guests, very understandably, prefers a bland diet at the moment, and chestnut soup might have given her indigestion. I’ve been experimenting with cream of asparagus soup lately, and Kathleen encouraged me to substitute that. I could find a recipe, I’m sure, but I’ve been drawn to experiment primarily by the recurrence of leftover asparagus. Kathleen and I love asparagus, but we can hardly be expected to eat an entire bunch.

First I steam the asparagus, if I haven’t already done that. Meanwhile, I sauté a chopped shallot in a saucepan. To this I add the asparagus and its steaming liquid, along with enough broth to cover the vegetables. Having brought the broth to a simmer, I let reduce the heat and cook it gently for twenty to thirty minutes. Then I purée the vegetables, together with a little broth, in a processor. 

That’s the basic idea. For this evening’s soup, a misguided frugality impelled me to use the entire spears of asparagus. I won’t do that again, not unless I’m prepared to push the purée through a chinois, because the result is inescapably stringy. I’ll stick to my regular practice of using only the tender tips that snap naturally from the stalks — even though that seems to defeat the whole purpose of the soup, which is to use up scraps of vegetables. Maybe it’s time to check out a real recipe after all.

(For some reason — nothing more cogent that a desire to be “interesting,” I’m afraid — I’ve been adding quarter teaspoons of ground cumin to the simmering broth. Thanks to dumb luck, this actually enhances the result.) 

For dessert, we had a bûche de Noël from Greenberg’s. Actually, in view of that provenance, and of the unforeseen and inexplicable presence of sliced almonds in the icing (!), I decided to call it a jûche. It was rich and tasty, but it wasn’t quite what we used to buy from Madame Dumas, late of Lexington Avenue. Nothing is forever.

Suddenly, it is the night before the night before Christmas, but you’d never know it from the look of our house. The carols are set to go on the Nano, but haven’t been asked for just yet. There is a stack of Christmas cards to open, but not a very thick one — although I do note that the custom of sending cards seems to have recovered somewhat from the body blow dealt by email and Facebook. As for sending Christmas cards, that’s a two-part operation. First out are the cards to nearby folk whom we hope to see at our open house on the Sunday afternoon between Christmas and New Year’s. All other cards go out after that party.  

It has been years — over a decade — since gifts had anything to do with our holidays. Everyone we know is positively arteriosclerosed with possessions, and when we see something that we know a friend could use or specially enjoy, we present it then and there. The other day, as the result of a happy accident, we were able to give Fossil Darling a nifty wall clock for his kitchen, which Quatorzse has been renovating (short of the nightmare of new cabinets). But no “shopping” was involved. Whenever I read that someone has been running around with a Christmas list, an activity that seems to involve visiting shopping malls — I can’t tell you how bizarre shopping malls have come to seem in the ten years since I last set foot in one, and how utterly penitential — I feel an almost historical relief, as if I had outlived a barbarous epoch. Just as I, personally, as an ancient Boomer, have outlived the idea that “watching television” is entertaining.

At the same time, it would have been a good idea to go looking for a wreath a few days ago. Hitherto, I didn’t have to go looking; I couldn’t go to the Food Emporium downstairs without passing a temporary forest of Christmas trees. But construction work on the Second Avenue subway has put a stop to that, perhaps for the rest of my natural life. When I spoke to the florist, to order a centerpiece for Christmas Eve dinner (something else that ought to have been attended to earlier), he regretted that he was “clean out” of wreaths. I don’t despair quite yet. If I can’t find one tomorrow afternoon, I shall buy a small tree, and cut it up. I had the wit to save the sturdy iron frame from last year’s.

No doubt because my birthday happens to fall on Twelfth Night, I have always been inclined to think of “the holidays” as the period between just about now and the Epiphany. It does not begin the day after Thanksgiving — nor (horrors!) at Hallowe’en. As a result, we are not sick of the whole thing already. Aside from the little matter of sending out invitations to our party, we have done so little in advance of Christmas Eve that it almost takes us by surprise to hear “God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen!” the first time round.

God rest ye, merry readers!

Nothing would have suited me more than a day spent at home, reading, writing, and making lists of all the things that I have to do. The bit about lists is not a complaint. I quite like making lists. I don’t know the first thing about them, but I like writing them down. You never know when you’re actually going to work your way through one.

But a day at home it was not to be. A print that I bought early last spring was scheduled to come back from the framer this evening. Why did it take so long to frame a picture? It just did. Quatorze was scheduled to hang the picture. I have become utterly dependent upon Quatorze’s picture-hanging skills, especially as my fused neck makes driving nails into the wall very awkward. Hanging the picture, moreover, would require re-hanging all the other pictures in the vicinity. What with chance and coincidence, the day grew a luxuriant schedule before it ever dawned.

I’ll spare you the itinerary. At day’s end, the storage unit was at least two orders of magnitude neater, emptier, and better organized than it was at the beginning. Quatorze and I had had a jolly lunch at the Baker Street Pub, where, frankly, I could happily spend whole days drinking Black & Tans and — well, “eating” is too crude a word for one’s engagement with their cottage fries, which are really pommes soufflées on rustic holiday. We had seen The Young Victoria, a film that, coming as it did on top of last night’s Messiah, left my tear ducts in sore wounded shape.  The new picture was hung, and all the pictures in the vicinity were rehung, except for a drawing of my mother that I made almost forty years ago, and that has lately struck me as in questionable taste. Questionable because I drew it with forty pencils and ninety erasers. Surely no drawing has ever been more overworked.

As for what didn’t get done, ha ha! Did you know that I’m planning to entertain about thirty guests at home on Sunday afternoon? I have not even fixed a menu, much less buttered a cake pan. But I’m not worried, because the theme of this year’s Christmas party is “No Ambition.”

Here’s a look at the new picture. I have had another print by the same artist for about twenty years. Now they face one another across the room I’m writing in. Where, tomorrow, I will spend the day reading, writing, and making lists.

Well, it’s pretty to think so.

This afternoon, I popped into the Video Room — I was passing by — and rented a recent picture that I haven’t seen, Four Christmases. Kathleen and I watched it after dinner, and liked it very much; I expect that I’ll buy the DVD. Vince Vaughn’s ability to talk himself into and out of sticky situtations simultaneously can’t be beat. As for his co-star, we couldn’t put our finger on what Reese Witherspoon was doing, exactly, but it was different, and it seemed very smart. The two actors were as superior to the material as their characters were to their families.

“Family” has always been a touchy subject for me. My latest theory is that I didn’t have one. I had something else — whether or not it was good or bad makes no difference, because it wasn’t family. I can’t attribute this alternative structure to adoption. I’ve never known an adopted person who was wholly at home in his or her new family, but because I read about such people rather often, I’ve decided to reserve judgment. So I’ll pin it on a notion of “adoption plus.” There was something else going on — or, more likely, not going on.

It suddenly occurs to me that “family” is a word that I never heard my father utter — not, I mean, in the adhesive sense. I have just begin thinking, actually, of my father’s silences, his discretions, the things that it didn’t occur to him to say. For a nice guy, he was remarkably honest. It has also occurred to me lately that he was not really keen on the family/parenting thing. Left to his own devices, he’d have been happy without nephews and nieces, much less a son and a daughter. He was famous for having nothing to say to kiddies.

We let each other down, my father and I. He moved us to Houston, in 1968. I never forgave that. I still haven’t. What a terrible thing to do to me — Houston! Conscientiously thoughtless it was it was. I paid him back, in 1980, by refusing to return to Houston after law school. That had been his idea of the deal, not only paying the tuition but getting me into the one non-Southwestern school that I was allowed to apply to. I hadn’t agreed to this deal, but I’d known that it was what he wanted. And yet I was hardly some captive child. I was nearly thirty, and yet every bit as incapable of taking care of myself as he feared I was. But I took good enough care of myself to make sure that I never went back to Texas.

Texas, once the largest state (territorially) in the Union, is a manifold place. I like to point out that it retains the power unilaterally — without permission from Washington — to subdivide into a total of six states. That Texans have failed to avail themselves of this magical multiplication of senators does not make them more impressive to me, I assure you. When I say “Texas,” I’m well aware of the differences between the three great cities, and between each of them and the vast hinterlands in which they’re embedded. Nonetheless, when I say that I wish that Texas did not exist, I’m talking about all of those complexities. The place is not devoid of interest. But it is devoid, for me, of whatever a territory might have to inspire a patriotic response. What I learned in Texas was that I disliked it, deeply.

My feelings about upstate New York (what I call “New York State“) are not much warmer, by the way, than my feelings about Texas. I’m sure that, if I had ever been obliged to live in Syracuse or Rochester, I would have hated it even more than Houston. I didn’t much like the town I grew up in, for the matter of that; but it had the advantage of a train station famously sixteen miles north of Times Square.

As for my feelings about my family, they consist primarily of doubting that I am capable of love at all. Loving anybody, that is. I could not love them. The notion of “family” just reminds me of my resentment, felt for so long (but no longer) that nobody asked me to choose these adopters. 

This afternoon, I read “Green Giant,” Evan Osnos’s New Yorker piece about China’s aggressive pursuit of environmentally-aware energy strategies. The piece is no love note; Mr Osnos makes it very clear at the start that China has a long, long way to go before its atmospheres are as clean as ours. But the thrust of the story takes a longer view, and the United States suffers in the comparison. If China has improved, we’ve done the other thing.

In America, things have gone differently. In April of 1977, President Jimmy Carter warned that the hunt for new energy sources, triggered by the second Arab oil embargo, would be the “moral equivalent of war.” He nearly quadrupled public investment in energy research, and by the mid-nineteen-eighties the U.S. was the unchallenged leader in clean technology, manufacturing more than fifty per cent of the world’s solar cells and installing ninety per cent of the wind power.

Ronald Reagan, however, campaigned on a pledge to abolish the Department of Energy, and, once in office, he reduced investment in research, beginning a slide that would continue for a quarter century. “We were working on a whole slate of very innovative and interesting technologies,” Friedmann, of the Lawrence Livermore lab, said. “And, basically, when the price of oil dropped in 1986, we rolled up the carpet and said, ‘This isn’t interesting anymore.’ ” By 2006, according to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the U.S. government was investing $1.4 billion a year—less than one-sixth the level at its peak, in 1979, with adjustments for inflation. (Federal spending on medical research, by contrast, nearly quadrupled during that time, to more than twenty-nine billion dollars.)

As I read the article, I felt that Mr Osnos was telling me useful things that, as a voter in the world’s superpower, I ought to know. But what about my fellow Americans who thought that Ronald Reagan was made of presidential timber — when in fact he was nothing more than a shill for the outlook of property owners in the Southwest United States. And what about the people who admired the second Bush, a man who made being “a shill for the outlook of property owners in the Southwest United States” sound like something much better than the worst possible president? And what about the fans of Sarah Palin, a woman who, in her contempt for genuine politics, really, really reminds me of Adolf Hitler, and who makes George W Bush take on the air of presidential sapling. What about all these omadhauns? What’s the use of reading about China’s coal gasification project if you’re yoked to utter morons?

Many people stop there — and they stop reading articles about China in The New Yorker. Me, I should like to stop being yoked to utter morons. Sarah Palan is an idiot. Once upon a time, perhaps, she was a small-town political operative, but the temptations of William Kristol and others have inflated her brain like a pink balloon of Bazooka chewing gum. It no longer computes. Anyone who thinks that she is a viable political candidate for anything more advanced than the governorship of Alaska (can we go back to being ‘the forty-eight’ one of these days?) is a backward adolescent. This assertion is no more open to argument than the proposition that reading is a waste of time, or that reality television is “democratic.” ‘

In any philosophical systems, there are axioms, points that don’t require re-argument every time something new comes up for discussion. When a given philosophical system’s axioms do need to be re-argued, then that system is either dead or dying. To anyone who argues that Sarah Palin’s views on the environment (even if I happen to agree with them) are deserving of national debate (they’re not, because Ms Palin is a barely-educated, barely-functional housewife), my reply is that perhaps it’s the axioms of our democratic franchise that we need to debate.

Even in America, the franchise is not universasl. We don’t allow toddlers to vote. We don’t allow young people between the ages of twelve and seventeen to vote — teenagers. Once upon a time, we required voters to have a certain net worth — usually, to have property worth a certain amount of rental income. We certainly don’t want to go back to that. But we desperately need a voter-qualification criterion.

How long, though, are we going to participate in a travesty of honoring the votes of jerks with potatoes where their brains ought to be? Smart people, can we think of something, before the dummies mount one of their human-pyramid spectacles and, falling over, as in their stupidity they inevitably will, crush us?  

It is universally acknowledged that I am an odd fellow, but the oddest thing about me, I’m convinced, is that I find MP3 recordings to be superior to CDs, just as I found CDs to be superior to LPs and tapes. I am clearly hearing something that no one else is listening for, while ignoring something else that means a lot to most other listeners.

What is so great about MP3s? Again and again, I hear new things in music that I’ve known for all of my adult life. New lines of counterpoint, rhythmic depth-charges that I’d missed. And every weekend, when I listen to operas while tidying the apartment, I understand some strange unnoticed line of Italian or German. MP3s make music clearer to me than it has ever been.

When I was young, and routinely unimpressed by the audiophile setups that I was obliged from time to time to stand before and worship, I thought that I was simply deaf, or inartistic, or missing a music receptor. This pained me only slightly, because I knew perfectly well, from more articulate exchanges, that I heard more, in the way of music, than almost everybody who wasn’t a score-reading musician. I still don’t know what all those geeky guys heard. They were certainly unable to explain it. I came to regard it as something like a sexual preference — fundamentally inexplicable.

I’m trying, at least, to express what I like about “compressed” music. It’s largely a matter of line. Think of a sketch — a few swift strokes on paper. Now think of that sketch worked into a drawing, with many, many more markings. That drawing is what I hear from my Nanos — more information, you’ll note, not less — and I’m very glad that I do. The sketch is merely vague, suggestive.

Possibly for those very reasons, the sketch is more atmospheric. Is that what’s lost in MP3 conversion? If so, I’m reminded of the old Horn & Hardart slogan: You can’t eat wallpaper. It’s nice, but it’s not the point.

If I am tired of guys repeating the lament that music downloads, while convenient, don’t sound as good as — as good as whatever superseded mode still holds their interest, it’s because they can’t be bothered to specify what’s missing. One might almost think that they’re simply missing their youth.  

When I talked this over with Kathleen, she spoke of the LP as “warm” and of the CD as “cold.” This is why I’m always inclined to put myself on the Aspie spectrum: for “warm,” I’d say “indistinct,” and, for “cold,” “crystalline.”

Because it is very late and I really haven’t got anything better to talk about, I’m going to go topical: the picture attached to this entry shows the lady who lives across the street. As always, when one sees her, she is positioned on the steps — the stoop, as one calls such a flight in Gotham — of what someone from the midwest might call a “town house.” As well it may be. There is no apparent way in which tenants could come and go. The stoop, as you can see, is littered with buckets and other impedimenta. These are carefully rearranged from time to time, usually in the morning. I’m sure that one of my neighbors has made a study of Our Lady of the Steps, and knows all about what she’s up to. I’ve only recently begun paying half-assed attention.

Not to be ghoulish, really, but the lady across the street reminds me of the tenant who occupied our apartment until his demise in 1983. He was an older Jewish guy with a black girlfriend — that’s what everyone said — and a number of his belongings remained in the apartment after we took possession. Some bookshelves, some strange carvings, and a lot of shag carpeting. However it worked out, it was not the sort of detail that my brain finds interesting. What I do recall is that the sliding closet doors in the master bedroom (the one with an en suite bathroom) had been removed, and the interior of the closet was painted pitch black. A sort of Turkish corner, perhaps — Sixties style. That was the feeling that the apartment still exhaled when we were given the key, about a week before we actually moved in. Middle-aged intellectual Manhattan hippie — right out of Saul Bellow, right?

I was a little older than half my current age, but not much. As for Kathleen, I do believe that she has spent more than half of her life time in this apartment.

When we took possession, of course, we thought that the previous tenant, now a dead man, had lived here forever. How could we imagine that we would occupy the premises far beyond the term of his tenancy? That’s not the sort of thing that occurs to you (unless you’re a pessimist) when you’re in your early thirties.

In those days, a lovely woman by the name of Rose was the rental agent. Rose decided who got which apartment. Kathleen was very sweet to Rose when she rented the studio on the sixteenth floor in 1980. Kathleen was even sweeter to Rose when we rented the one-bedroom on the seventh floor a year later, in 1981. Kathleen was extraordinarily sweet to Rose when we were offered the apartment that we have been in since 1983. It is not unlikely that Rose expected us to be sweetissimo. What she told us, though, was that she’d given the apartment to us because she she was “grossed out” by the tenants who called her the minute they read our precedent’s death notice in the Times. A case of faux faute de mieux, no?

Being sweet, we half believed her. We were in any case glad to get up here, and not just because the apartment was larger. Our studio had faced north — a dull view, but very quiet. Our new apartment faced east, and was back from 86th Street. The apartment in between had been in the front of building, right on top of Yorkville High Street, and early mornings were a nightmare. As a callow young man, I looked out at the view of Citibank (now blocked) all the time, but I never looked down on the streetscape. I have no idea if Our Lady of the Steps was busy then. I half think that she was. As I say, though, one of my many, many neighbors is sure to know.

A fellow blogger came to dinner this evening, and I only wished that it had gone on longer: a very good time was had by me. But when the dinner was over, and the coach of conversation turned into the pumpkin of pickup, all I could think of was the ever-lengthening list of things that I could have done better. This sort of post-mortem anxiety is part and parcel of entertaining anybody for the first ten times. I know all about all the corrections that fly to mind in the wake of any dinner party. They may be neurotic, in that we’re worried about things that nobody else noticed; or they may be psychopathic, completely overlooking glaring horrors that were evident to everyone else. But we do learn from them.

There was a new note this evening, however, possibly because, as I’ve already suggested, what I really wanted to enjoy was a conversation with an extraordinarily intelligent mind. Of the meal that I prepared, I hoped only that it wouldn’t be unappetizing. It followed my Degree Zero low-key menu: roast chicken with simple extras (tomato soup, roast potatoes, bought dessert). It’s true that I heated up some cheese hors d’oeuvre from Agata & Valentina. Big deal. We hardly ate them.

But I’m thinking now that to ask anyone into your home for dinner is really to dump a lot of information in a guest’s lap. Maybe the restaurant isn’t, by strict somparison, nearly as noisy. Perhaps this — and not an obsession with privacy — is what instructs people of the European persuasion to entertain only their oldest friends at home.

On top of that, I was the waiter as well as the cook. I don’t mind those jobs at all — but is what I mind important? Maybe my friend would have preferred a dinner companion who stayed put at the table. (We had soup/salad/chicken/cheese/eclairs.) When the evening was over, there lingered in my mind an awful vibration: I’d been “on,” what Fossil Darling used to call “societal.” Gawd, not that.

I remember when all I worried about was whether the chicken was overcooked. Tonight, I’m afraid, I’m worried that I was overcooked.

In retrospect, it was a fine day, but only in retrospect do we get to see the bottom line. For most of the afternoon, I fretted about having to go out this evening. I behaved as though seeing Lynn Redgrave’s Nightingale were a chore, which of course it was not. But I wanted to stay home and work on things. I suppose I was no better when I was nine, and thought only of my train set in the basement.

Then, at about 5:30, the bottom dropped out: the file transfer protocol program declined to function. The FTP program is the utility that transmits pages from my computer to Portico’s Web server. Even after rebooting, it declined to function. Rebooting was the problem, actually; I had rebooted the machine just before lunch. I’d promised Quatorze a copy of Barry Lyndon, and Jason (God of Tech) had cautioned me that DVDs were best copied on empty buffers. It had been over a week since the last reboot, so….

The next thing you know, checkdisk. I do hate the sight of DOS screens. And then a few of apps didn’t work quite as usual once the machine was up and running. PhotoShop, for example. I had to deselect an option that’s never checked in order to resize an image in pixels rather than inches. That was weird. When Cute FTP melted down, I wasn’t entirely surprised. But I was completely flustered anyway. The proverbial headless chicken — that was me. Jason would never give me up (I don’t think), but there are TeamViewer chat transcripts to prove it. Ned Beatty could have played the part of me.

I couldn’t be having this problem at 5:30! I had to get dressed for the theatre soon! I had to go out, and leave my wounded computer untended. Jason appeared as faithfully as the genie in Aladdin’s lamp (remotely — a bit of magic that couldn’t be managed in Sheherazade’s day), but even before he suggested that reloading the application was probably the best idea, I was wondering where, just the other day, I had put all the computer-related CDs. I had moved them for a reason — there were too many discs for the box that I’d been using — but where had I put them? Cluck, cluck!

After I got dressed, I found discs; sometimes, you have to solve a bother before you can solve the problem that it was bothering you from. By 6:45, the domestic security status was “copacetic.” My brain was recovering some of its wattage.

There had certainly been a brownout. Before making contact with Jason, I had madly attached the two pages that I’d planned to upload to Portico to emails sent from my mindspring account to my gmail account. On the laptop in the living room (where I “create”), I enjoyed a mad runaround trying to figure out whither, exactly, Firefox places downloaded attachments. Cute FTP was working fine on the laptop, so I was able to upload the pages — phew!

But here’s how crazed I was. In order to make sure that the pages looked just right, I had to go back into the blue room and interrupt Jason so that I could open Portico and see if all was well. It never ever crossed my mind that I could have conducted this examination from the laptop. My brain had self-stupiditized.

When I told Jason that, if I were rich, I’d plaster the town will billboards advertizing his services, he demurred: the phone calls would drive him crazy. But of course if I were rich, I could stake him to a receptionist. Get car! And you would, too. I’m talking about the thanks of a very grateful clientele.

Walking along 84th Street this afternoon, between York and First, I passed a family group headed in the opposite direction, toward the river. I fished myself out of the stream of consciousness in time to see the two little fellows who were bringing up the rear.  They might have been short for their age, but they were still very young — seven at the most, and I’d plump for six. I have never seen two boys less inclined to play, much less to roughhouse. On the contrary: they had the air of sixty-six. They were walking along with their hands in their coat pockets, their heads inclined toward one another, talking with bemused smiles, as if they had already seen everything.

I wish I’d taken their picture, especially as the camera was in the palm of my hand.

***

I have many reasons for being not regretting my youth, for not missing being young. Tonight, my reason is this: when I was young, I wished I were somebody else more or less all the time. Sometimes, I wanted to be the person that I hoped I’d grow up to be, but this image was understandably vague. I draw no small satisfaction from the general sense of having fulfilled that dream, whatever it was. Perhaps it’s because one always wants to be kind to children that I idiotically believe that I’ve done the kid that I used to be the kindness of turning into Moi.

Most of the time, however, I dreamed of being somebody else — somebody definite, this or that actual person whom I could see down the hall or across the room. My innumerable crushes were collaterally instructive, because each one involved imagining someone else’s life. There was nothing vampirish about my longing. I did not want to commandeer someone else’s existence; if I dreamed of being someone else, I did not want to have become someone else. But I spent every waking moment wanting to pop out of my skin.

I can’t think what made me so dissatisfied with my own life, but it had a lot to do with living in this body of mine. I don’t hate it, but I don’t really acknowledge it. To me, it is somebody else’s body, and I am not that somebody. I could complain about it for hours, but dissatisfaction has nothing to do with the case. Children often suspect that they’re adopted, that they’re really the children of (fascinating) offstage parents. I was adoped, and I understood that there was nothing fascinating about where I came from. Maybe that was it. Having been adopted, I wanted a new body to go with the new status.

I was well into my forties before I understood, profoundly, that my intelligence and my sensibility are no less physical attributes than my height or my elusively-colored eyes. (When Kathleen tells me that my eyes are “really green today!” I know that I am feeling well.) I now understand this paradox: wishing that I were someone else precisely because I am who I am. When I was young, however, such insights were beyond me. And, in any case, I no longer wish that I were somebody else. Not at all! I’m quite pleased to be me. I have succumbed to abominable conceit: I’m amazed by my good luck. But that’s now.

***

Those little men, walking all but arm in arm along 84th Street — I saw them for four or five seconds at the most. For minutes — hours — afterward, I wanted to be them. No: I wanted to be both of them, and there you have it. You can’t be two people. I wanted to be their friendship, their mutual comfort. I wanted it even though I know exactly what it is, from happy personal experience. My own desire to be somebody other than myself began to fade away when I met Kathleen. My often acute dislike of myself, complete with arioso tropes of suicide, took a while to disappear entirely, but it did disappear, because of the great niceness of being with her. I was thirty-three when Kathleen and I married; which means that I have not yet spent quite half of my life as her husband. But let’s say that I have, because I’d like to acknowledge that I want for nothing in this happy half.

Those smart little boys, though, reminded me that I wanted for everything when I was their age. — for everything beyond the food clothing shelter basics. I so badly, badly wanted someone to talk to.

Lucky fellas! I wish them every happiness.

This is just to thank Hendrik Hertzberg for the Comment piece that opens this week’s Talk of the Town in The New Yorker.

A dismal process of elimination has left the President to design a strategy that he believes is the only one that offers a chance, in his words, “to bring this war to a successful conclusion.” Or, at least, a bearable one. Deliver a hard punch to the Taliban, break its momentum, and welcome its defectors; throw a bucket of cold water on the hapless and corrupt central government; carve out space and time for projects of civilian betterment and the development of Afghan forces that are capable of maintaining some semblance of security; forge “an effective partnership with Pakistan”—to list the elements of Obama’s strategy is to recognize its difficulty. It is full of internal tensions, most prominently between the buildup of troops and the eighteen-month timeline for beginning their withdrawal. (To the extent that the troop surge weakens the enemy while the timeline focusses minds in Kabul and Islamabad, however, that tension could be a creative one.) The plan does not, of course, guarantee success. The best that can be claimed for it is that it does not guarantee failure, as, in one form or another, the alternatives almost certainly do.

Sorry for the long passage; the entire essay is necessarily dense with the complications of the mess that, as Mr Hertzberg points out, the president has inherited from his predecessor.

Last week, when Mr Obama made his West Point speech, I seemed to hear a lot of liberal folks of my own age complaining that he had let them down. I’m afraid that I wanted to smack each and every one of them for the wilful simplification of their thinking. They seemed — rather smugly, if truth be told — to believe that their rebukes ought to shame the White House into issuing, at the very least, an abject apology.

Tragic simplification may be a disease that the president brought with him to Washington. Last fall, before the election, I was appalled to hear one friend after another talk of the Rapture. It wasn’t that Rapture, for, when it happened, my friends would still be here, and they’d still be wearing their clothes. But their Rapture did happen — or did it?  That’s the problem. “I feel that we’re on the cusp of a new era,” they’d said. If they weren’t right, though, who’s fault would that be? I felt sorry for Barack Obama while he was still a candidate. It was clear that, within the year, he’d be up against some awful coalition of Lysistratas and Bacchantes. Thank heaven for Tiger Woods!

Does this sound misogynistic? I don’t mean it to be. It’s possible that women voice their political opinions in my hearing more willingly than men do. (Size matters.) At the same time, I observe that women make up their minds much more quickly than men do, probably because life obliges them to cope more pragmatically. The difficulty is that pragmatism is not expected of anyone here but the president. It’s everyone else’s job to strain, against the full current of stress and everyday confusion, to asppreciate the far greater stress and confusion of the issues that President Obama has to deal with. It is his job to turn these complications (messes) into complexities (necessarily imperfect solutions). Like Mr Hertzberg, I think that he is going about this job in a thoughtful, deliberate manner. He’s not perfect, but that’s not the problem. The problem is the behavior of his erstwhile supporters, who seem to have been partying on some leftover Bush-era Kool-Aid. Maybe they were drinking it then. Maybe they thought that all it would take for a new era to breast its cusp would be the election of a mule.

Well over forty years ago, The New Yorker‘s was the only establishment voice that was systematically committed to opposing the folly of our misadventure in Vietnam. Following the logic of that tradition, Mr Hertzberg might have called for the immediate pull-out from Afghanistan that so many “realist” liberals want. That he didn’t do so is all the proof I need that the most important periodical in the United States is still the home of the brave.

Roxy Paine’s Maelstrom will be coming down soon, at least from the Museum’s roof garden. It was my second-favorite roof garden installation, after the anthology of works by Cai Guo-Qiang.

It didn’t suggest “maelstrom” to me. It reminded me of the woods. The woods — I must decline to capitalize the name or to put it in quotation marks, so quotidian was it for us — was a seven-acre tract of undeveloped land that started almost across the street from our house on Hathaway Road in Eastchester, where I lived from 1955 to 1960, when we moved into the house in Bronxville proper that we would abandon for a place in Houston’s Tanglewood in 1968. “Tanglewood” — but Roxy Paine’s tubes and bulbs don’t make me think of Houston, that’s for sure. I came away from my few years in the woods (it seemed like forever) permanently disappointed by untrammeled nature. Which only made me appreciate Ms Paine’s sculpture more fully. Whatever she may have thought she was creating with all that velvety metal, her discipline ended up capturing, at least for me, the sloppiness of the local wilderness.

I was going to write on a very bourgeois theme this evening, my love of comfort, and my corresponding dislike of the sharp irritations of Modernism. For a week now, I’ve been considering the Hilobrow platform (for want of a shorter way of putting it), according to which, without a doubt, I am a rank middlebrow. A whole platoon!

Someone wrote that the middlebrow person is terrified of lust and magnificence — lust being “low” and magnificence being, well, you get it. And the only thing that I argued with was “terrified.” Magnificence is blinding and exhausting; the true secret of Versailles is that it is not very magnificent. Just magnificent enough to be lived with every day. As for lust, or desire, or whatever it was, I rejoice that it has been a long, long time since I was last consumed by it. There are lots of things that I want. I want to get up in the morning, and I want to want to read the paper (and I usually do). I want to write entries for this site. But I’m afraid that I don’t really want anything that I can’t have. Desire for the unattainable is both pathetic and monstrous.

At McNally Jackson the other night, Edmund White talked about Rimbaud’s invention of obscurity. I liked the frank way in which he conceded that his biographical subject’s work was pointedly, self-consciously difficult, or perhaps impossible, to understand. The impenetrability of Les Illuminations doesn’t bother me, though, because I feel that I’m expected to delight in the voluptuousness of the obscurities, not to decode them. Wallace Stevens generates the same kind of happiness. Who cares what it means;

                                                  This is the barrenness
Of the fertile thing that can attain no more.

is gorgeous! There are more beautiful chains of words in Credences of Summer, but no thoughts more luxurious.

In the end, what it comes down to is that I developed an early taste for the courtly pleasures. I find the greatest beauty in ease (which is certainly not easy!), while deliberate difficulty of any kind strikes me as untutored rudeness, almost always devoid of interest.

Against all of this fine filigree, you will readily understand the pain of wanting to be the friend of someone who does not want you for one. The Cai photograph reminded me of that. I remember a day up there that was just that blue.  

Today’s banner is not what today looked like. At all. It’s hard to imagine, in fact, that the city ever looks as it does above, given its appearance over the past few grey days. By the way, what seems to be smoke drifting over the Park is actually the already bare branches of trees that have shed their leaves for the year.

The day was mezza mezza. I didn’t take a stab at the paperwork project, but I drew hope from the fact that I hadn’t given up on it and put things “away.” After yesterday’s excitement — for a sexagenarian like me, yesterday was chock full of incident, even though nothing happened that, twenty years ago, would not have gone unremarked — I felt dead on arousal, and if the morning was a struggle, the afternoon was — existential. I did write a letter to a good friend in which I described something that, for the first time in ages, I wouldn’t write about here. The letter took over an hour to compose, but I had a ball. I’ve been living such a dull life! Which is all for the best — I love dull! Dull is the new thrill! But it takes the gleam of indiscretion for me to write a proper letter these days; it calls for secrets that I must keep from you, my gentle readers.

By return post, the suggestion was made… but never mind. It involved Quatorze. It projected an unthinkable scenario. Delicious (and wholly respectable!), but unthinkable.

In the evening, I braved the pluviosity and took the train down to Bleecker Street, whence I hopped, skipped and jumped over puddles to McNally Jackson, where the paperback editions of three Atlas & Co biographies was celebrated by the three authors. Louis Begley (Kafka), Francine du Plessix Gray (Mme de Staël) and Edmund White (Rimbaud) talked about the pleasures of writing nonfiction books about long-ago writers — Mr Begley subtitled his book “biographical essay.” Ms Gray pronounced an aphorism that can’t have been making its first appearance, but I was so struck by it that I must copy it out: 

Biography is the transformation of information into illumination.

It’s not the solution to world hunger, but it’s pretty fantastic all the same.

As you can imagine, I hadn’t been in the mood to go out on a nasty day, especially as I’d gone out the night before. (Sexagenarian!) But two carrots were waving in front of me. One was so mundane that I’m not even going to discuss it. The other, however, was Ms NOLA’s enthusiastic agreement to have dinner with me after the event. I’ve been wanting to have dinner at the Chinatown Brasserie for the longest time! Ever since Quatorze and I walked by the place last spring, in fact. I’ve been several times for lunch, and while the food was always delicious, I had no reason to think that it would be different after dark. But the room would be different — and tonight I found out that indeed it is. For the Chinatown Brasserie, occupying the generically beaux-arts interior of a former bank or insurance office, has been decked out with Shanghai nightclub drag. Think the opening scene of …Temple of Doom. (Oh, how downhill that movie went from there!) Red red red paper lanterns hanging from the high ceiling ought to be enough to put you in the picture, but there is also the carp pool at the base of the stairs to the banqueting rooms in the basement. (How elegant the right sort of corpse would look, bobbing among those huge gold fish.)

Edmund White told a wonderful story about gaining access to a source of information for his book about Jean Genet. He paid a pretty young woman to take French lessons from the source; I guess he paid for the lessons as well. Eventually, the pretty girl was able to charm the source into seeing Mr White. They became friends, but it was la solita storia — Genet eventually broke with anybody who was close to him. Sooner or later, he mistreated his friends and “made them cry.” I thought of the lunacy of taking Jean Genet’s bad behavior personally. Then I remembered how personally I had taken — have taken — a rather Genetish fellow’s bad behavior toward me. It almost got me crying! Nobody has been planted at my doorstop, asking for English lessons!

That it is raining late at night on the second of December is not made any easier to bear by the fact that it is really rather cold as well. If it were just a few degrees colder, it could at least be scenic.

A new world opened up to me this evening, a world of sophisticated music lovers with a taste for hearing music in stylish homes. Entrée had not been expensive, and my experience of the evening intensified my awareness of the bargain. Let me put “not expensive” in relative terms. My benefactor ticket (name printed in program and everything!) cost 25% more than the Carnegie Hall seat (in Row S) that I bought for Musica Sacra’s Messiah on 21 December. And I bought two of those. There will, presumably, be no caterers handing out delectable goodies at Carnegie Hall. No unquestioningly refilled glasses of wine. There is a lot to be said for Classical Action, the AIDS-benefit organization that sponsored the event. And a lot will be said about certain so-called “music lovers” among my acquaintance who might have been expected to tip me off to these events — were they not opera queens in thrall to the crudely athletic displays of certain Swedish and Australian sopranos, not to mention the antics of deceased pasta-padded Italian tenors incapable of reading music. (Do I make myself clear?) Certain nameless friends — worms who don’t deserve to have names.

I’ll write up the point of the evening — a first performance ever, it seems, by Thomas Meglioranza and Reiko Uchida, of Schubert’s Winterreise — as soon as I finish this paperwork project that has taken over the apartment. Sooner, perhaps. I now have two fantastic and fantastically diverse evenings of Tomness to talk about. And Reikoness! (That’s the last time, Ms Uchida, that I will ever say such a thing; I promise!) And I can’t wait! Suffice it to say that the duo’s musicianship this evening began where that of earlier greats leaves off: at the top.

I don’t know why I felt compelled to show up promptly at 6:30 for the pre-concert reception. I was alone, and I didn’t expect to know anybody. It turned out that I did know someone, but, as always happens when a party presents just one familiar face, I was horribly anxious about abusing the privilege. So I was standing quietly against a wall, not at all discontented but only wishing that I could be invisible — the site of a solitary person is always embarrassing to everyone else at a party — when a gentleman of roughly my age but vastly trimmer figure introduced himself and launched a pleasant talk about music. He knew, it seemed, everybody, but this information was imparted without the slightest shade of ostentation. When he talked about talking about music with Joshua Bell, I was more interested than envious or resentful. (We can’t all talk to Joshua Bell!) When it was time for him to move on, I thanked him for chatting and gave him my name. When he told me his, I realized that he had introduced himself at the start. He was Charles Hamlen, Classical Action’s founder.

You can take your pick: Mr Hamlen took pity on a solitary gent and struck up a conversation. Or he was offering an indirect bit of thanks to a benefactor (see “bargain,” above) to whose identity he had been alerted by an adroit administrator. It doesn’t matter. I became a fan of Classical Action then and there — even though I’m aware that there will be events that cost the earth just to get into, and forget seeing my name in the program.

As it turned out, someone I knew saw my name in the program before I did. (I didn’t actually open the program at all until I was sitting opposite Kathleen in a booth at the Brasserie afterward. Sitting through Winterreise without looking at the texts was my own little way of showing off, if only to myself. There was a time, not so very long ago, when I listened to all of it at least once every day.) That someone was sometime fellow blogger Aaron G—, whom I’ve met here and there over the years, usually in the vicinity of Joe Jervis. Always, in fact, until tonight. It was so super to see Aaron after the concert that I didn’t until just now wonder why I didn’t see him before. Blame my neck, which makes surveying a room so awkward that I resign myself to a regal “stiff necked-ed-ness.”

I haven’t said a word about the loft in which the recital took place, and I’m not going to. It’s because of such scruples that I am not a novelist. I will say that it was sleek and stripped- down and, to my eye, very Sixties, although it’s my impression that neither of my hosts was  alive in the Sixties. You could say the same of my place, though, with its eclectic mix of styles from centuries before my appearance on terra firma. (Have I shown you my Ramses II telephone?)

Appearances are deceiving, especially in New York. During my pre-concert pilaster period, I began to overhear a trio of stylish men who were chatting nearby. Had they been standing just a little bit further off, I might have projected all sorts of interesting topics onto their conversation, and wished that I could join it. But when I heard one of the men say that throwing up was the least of his dog’s problems, and that his boyfriend (not the dog’s) was convinced that too much water was being added to the pet’s dried food — well, I’m sure that they were three perfectly nice men, but talking about dogs, dog food, and dog-do has no place in my reveries of sophisticated New York evenings.

I got a nice chuckle out of it, though.

All I want to do, lately, is to read books. Yes, books! Not feeds, not blog entries, not even engaging articles in The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books. Books, period, is what I want to read.

And I have plenty of ’em. Although I’ve been running a sizeable backlog of unread books for several years now, the pile-up these days is something like the US deficit: it’s very difficult to imagine ever catching up with it. Worse, I’ve gotten much better at buying books that I’ll really want to read, when I get round to them. My purchases used to be more aspirational: I’d have liked to have read such-and-such a book. That still happens, of course. But the two very meaty doorstoppers in my nonfiction pile, one about the Thirty Years War (Wilson) and the other about the “Glorious” Revolution (Pincus) are absolute must-reads for me; if I read nothing else, I want to have digested them. I’ve already started in on the War, and I’m loving it, but there’s a certain sadness to the sense that I’ll probably never read C V Wedgwood again.

If I read nothing else! I catalogued eight or nine fiction titles at Facebook the other day. It’s true that two of the books don’t really compel me. Another two, I haven’t really even started. I left off Orhan Pamuk’s new book entirely, by oversight. One book, Alice Munro’s Too Much Happiness, contains several short stories that I read when they appeared in The New Yorker and — guess what — I’ve read one again and want to re-read the others. Meanwhile, I’m adoring Ms Munro’s compatriot, Mavis Gallant, whose collection of uncollected stories, The Cost of Living, came out a few months ago.

I meant to read a chapter of John Cheever’s Falconer this afternoon. I read Falconer when it came out, in 1977, before I headed off to law school I should think. Blake Bailey’s highly-regarded biography of the author has given Falconer a boost: it’s now generally considered to be Cheever’s best novel. Novels were not Cheever’s forte; he will be remembered for his short stories. But Falconer is being singled out as worthy of reading all the same, possibly because it addresses a number of themes that Cheever hadn’t dared to write about  before.

But I never got to Falconer, because I was overambitious on the paperasse front. The afternoon saw our dining table covered in neat piles of paper, as I gathered caches of documents (receipts, scraps, manuals) from all corners of the apartment. Next to the table was a shopping bag full of discarded items, proof that some progress had been made. But the neat piles have all been stacked, one atop the other, on the bed, in order to make way for dinner (pizza and zucchini sticks — a moral barometer if there ever was one). One forgets how deadly paperwork can be. At some point between around seven-thirty this evening my brain seized up and melted down: Alzheimer paste. On the phone to Kathleen, I  babbled. I couldn’t see how I would ever write up the Daily Office.

But that has become the most familiar fear that I know. Happily, I had read my feeds and made my choices, so that, if I couldn’t afford the luxury of reading, I could still produce some writing.

Coming home in the middle of the evening from a delightful Thanksgiving feast, I was sorely tempted to take it easy — to go to bed, if truth be told.

But I didn’t; I couldn’t. Even though it was a major national holiday, I couldn’t find anything in the files that authorized a day off from the Daily Office. So I scratched out a highly abbreviated list of links. That wasn’t any good, either; I had to flesh it all out. Just as if it were a nice weekday morning. I’m not kidding: I didn’t have a choice.

We did have a lovely day, though, especially considering that it’s the holiday that we’ve sought to avoid for over five years now.

Oh, the things that I was going to do today!

Here’s one of them: if you’re reading this at Portico, you’ll see a bold-faced list of links to the left. Not the “New at Portico” links, but the ones below the centered asterisks. That is a list in dire need of a re-think. (If you’re reading this at The Daily Blague, click here for a look.)

Just for the heck of it, I inserted a much-needed link. Can you find it? It wasn’t there yesterday!

Here’s the deal: Portico is ten years old. My dear daughter, the expectant and imminent mother of my first grandchild, designed it in her spare time in the annus mirabilis 2000. (Maybe in 1999, but I think it was after Y2K.) Some of the code that Megan wrote is still in use, and the site itself is still a “frameset.” Some of the menus are tables, and some of them aren’t. Periodic upgrades and revampings have not been consistent throughout Portico. The navigation system has its own history. (It answers the question, “What was he thinking?”) The whole site is like a pleasant old English manor house, to which successive dukes and earls have added wings in the latest style. (A characteristically grandiose comparison, wouldn’t you say — until you kept reading.) I used to say, back when the site was new, that I envisioned it as a kind of space station, to which new stuff would be added from time to time in no particular fashion; in the virtual world, as in the extraterrestrial, the absence of gravity means that overall design needn’t be visibly coherent. But I think I’ve carried that idea beyond its tensile strength.

So: if I couldn’t find the time to overhaul a brief menu today, when, d’you suppose, am I going to find the time to reorganize all of Portico? Happily, I know the answer. I am going to reorganize all of Portico when a vision of how it ought to look befalls me. When that happens, I’ll be a difficult person to be around for a week or two, and everything but my personal hygiene will be neglected. Until then, I shall plod along in sweetly medieval fashion, higgledy-piggledy to all appearances but really always doing whatever it is that seems right at the time. The problem with doing what seems right at the time is fixing all the old stuff that doing so suddenly renders wrong.

Lately, I’m in love with this page (at Portico). It ought to be the “index” page — the page that opens first — but I’m still in love with the blurry scan of that Pennell print (blurry because the print is in a frame), with nothing but Portico imprinted upon it — an idiosyncrasy that has provoked complaints from quite a number of friends, and doubtless frustrated many more unknown visitors. For years, this page labored under the moniker “Vestibule,” a bad idea for which I have a very hard time accepting responsibility. Now, it’s the most happening page that I’m working on.

It’s not that I’m cowering in shame, paralysed by the indelible memory of having said something truly stupid (or worse). No. But I am almost allergric, this evening, to the sound of my own voice.

It was a nice day. Still exhausted from the weekend, and feeling entitled, by yesterday’s steady work, to refrain from bounding out of bed the moment I woke up, I progressed in a leisurely fashion to the computer, stopping in the kitchen to boil water for Kathleen’s matutinal tea and toast, when boom: I remembered that I’d made a date to be at the Museum this morning at 10:30.

If I weren’t, just for the moment (I hope), tired of hearing myself talk, I’d tell you about it. I console myself for my silence with the thought that nothing very interesting or unusual happened. At two o’clock, I bid my friends au revoir and said that I must get back to work. I made two stops on Madison Avenue and one on Lex. I was back at work before four. By the time Kathleen got home, shortly before ten, the pizza and the zucchini sticks were still warm enough to be tasty.

Reading about the failure of the ERA’s ratification in Gail Collins’s wonderful book is more dispiriting than I can say. Like Betty Friedan, I should like to have burned Phyllis Schlafly at the stake — although drawing and quartering might have more certainly wiped the smirk off that woman’s face.  Collins’s account is valiant and fair, but I was overwhelmed by hatred all the same. The worst thing about hating someone like Phyllis Schlafly is the mirror principle: your hate is reflected right back, to the extent that the object of your hatred is looking back. Someone hates you — or at least what you believe.  One of the two of you ought to pack up and leave for the New World. But there are no more New Worlds.

As I said, I’m sick of the sound of my own voice. Which I take as a compliment.

This morning, after a spate of taxing dreams, I woke up thinking like Eve Harrington in the New Haven hotel scene at the end of All About Evei: “No, I couldn’t possibly.” The mere idea of getting out of bed was crushing. The thought making up for all the work that I didn’t do this weekend (because I was busy with other work) was totally flattening. I wouldn’t  claim that I’ve given the performance of my life today, but even if I were to stop the day’s work with this sentence, I’d be somewhere between impressed and amazed. And what was the secret? One thing at a time.

First, I chose the links for tomorrow’s Daily Office. The show must go on, after all. Then, putting all of that away, as I would now do on any day, I got to work on the delinquencies. I wrote a Monday Scramble that linked to no new pages at Portico — there weren’t any. I threw together a “Have a Look” entry for this afternoon. I wrote the Book Review review, and then a note about Precious and a short page about the Sam Shepard story in The New Yorker. All of that got published. Then I tackled the Daily Office links. I won’t say that it now takes as long to publish the Daily Office as it does to write it, but I’m still new at this business of cross-publishing (if that’s the word), and I have to think about what I’m doing. (It helps, enormously, that I’ve been playing with two sites for five years now — I know more than I think, going in, about what a new project will entail in the way of checklists — lists that in fact  never get written down. A by now unconscious understanding of the interrelation of the blog (with its WordPress platform) and the Web site (an accumulation of .htm pages, manually uploaded to the server by me) tailors my sense of What’s Next from the very beginning. But I still do have to second-guess myself about publishing the Daily Office once at The Daily Blague and twice at Portico.)

Am I in the middle of some de-blogging phase? I do wonder. The principle blog entries appear at Portico as well, every day. It’s as though I’ve celebrated the fifth anniversary of The Daily Blague by making it redundant. 

*

Last night’s dinner had one too many courses. Having just made the first winter batch of tomato soup was no reason to put it on the menu. It wasn’t a question of too much food. Rather, there was the extra pot on the stove. Things would have gone more swimmingly if I’d had that burner to work with — or, at least, the stove-top space.

Shrimp risotto — a dish that I’ve made so often lately that I’m almost tiring of it — followed by a three-rib standing roast of beef, with its Yorkshire pudding, horseradish sauce, and a dish of steamed asparagus — would have been plenty. Not to mention the store-bought Opera Cake (an Agata & Valentina specialty that takes the place of coffee at my table.) Yorkshire pudding, by the way, is the easiest thing in the world, if you make individual puddings instead of one gigantic one. Even if you spill some of the 425º hot lard on your trousers because there isn’t room on the stove-top to set down the pan properly.

On Thursday, we’ll be tootling up to Claremont Avenue for a feast to which we’ve been kindly invited. I’ll be weighted down by a quantity of champagne but otherwise untroubled by culinary exercise. Our hosts have the only Manhattan view that I would be happy with if I had to give up the one that I’ve loved for over 25 years: looking east, over Barnard’s campus, at the dome of Low Library. There is something intensely Antonioni about the composition, but I’ve never been able to put my finger on exactly what.

**

What was different between this morning and right now is the small but regular body of work that was due at midnight last night and that has now been completed. It’s simple and obvious, but still somewhat strange to observe that work — meaningful work (and this work here is very meaningful to me, regardless of its use to anyone else) — is a weight that we discharge by doing it. That’s what I minded so much about being tied up with other things over the weekend: I wouldn’t have the pleasure of having done things that were supposed to be done. It’s gotten to the point where I couldn’t possibly put off until tomorrow what I could do today.

Last night, we gave a small dinner party, partly in order to introduce a young artist to some old friends. The young artist came down with something in the afteroon and wasn’t able to make it, but his mother, whom I hadn’t seen in almost forty years, and who happens to be in town at the moment, was, and so the mini-reunion part of my plans met with success.

The only problem (aside from the lees of red wine) is that I am tossing, today, in a backwash of recollections that, for the moment, only grows more turbulent. To meet with an intelligent friend whom you haven’t seen in forty years is to take a very quick measure of the ground that you have covered in that time. There is also the perplexity of looking at an old snapshot of yourself that you have not seen before. These personal sensations are enveloped in a dim but vast awareness that it really is not, repeat not, all about you.

It is not unlikely that these roiling impressions are inspired by recollections of the great friend whom the young artist’s mother and I had in common, Michael Patrick O’Connor. As I was making the bed this morning, it struck me, with all the force of Rilke’s famous last line, that Michael Patrick was our Archaic Torso. To spend time with him was to know that you must change your life.

Wealth and ease invite us, we forget.
Renouncing talents that you do not need
in moonlit snaps of tourist Attica
discover sleep as an exercise
for the whole body and five eyes
Ignore the rain that has not filled the skies.
                                            (From “Coming Out”)

“Running late” barely attains the level of understatement.