When I looked at the program, my short hairs stood on end. They were playing K 563, and I almost didn’t go.

If I were a Renaissance pope, but in a world of music, not Christianity, I would found churches everywhere in honor of my favorite saint, Mozart’s Trio in E-flat for Vioilin, Viola and Violoncello. In that alternative world, I might hear my desert-island music more often. Mozart called it a “divertimento,” and yet it’s very difficult to play. That puts it at the North Pole of the Mozart-Liszt axis. Mozart wrote difficult music that sounds very straightforward and easy. It’s no wonder that more virtuoso reputations have been made playing Liszt, who wrote relatively straightforward music that sounds fiendishly difficult. It’s all very nice to have aficionados in the audience who know the score, but they’re never going to be numerous enough to fill Carnegie Hall. Or even Grace Rainey Rogers.

I did go, though. I was there, I mean. I was there, and the MMA Artists were going to play Köchel Werke Verzeichnis 563. I couldn’t believe that all I had to do was hang around until after intermission. I expected an interfering inconvenience  of some kind; when you’re my age, you just do. But I was fine. Considering that I was alone — Kathleen is in North Carolina this weekend, counting the silver (to make sure that her mother didn’t take any of it with her) — I was about as happy as it’s possible to be, in an unexcited, no-big-deal sort of way. I went a bit early, because it dawned on me that, on a Friday night, when the Museum stays open late, there are things to do, or at least to look at, if you arrive in plenty of time. I walked in and immediately felt that I owned the place. In a way, I did. Nobody, as we lawyers say of easements, had a better right to be there than I did.

I went and had a good look at The Milkmaid. I felt that I’m beginning really to like this picture, even though I have a thing about glamorizing servants. (It’s a sin against them, really.) It was very clear to me that I’d take The Milkmaid any day over the later and “more accomplished” Young Woman With a Water Pitcher — a painting that got a very notable second-best boost from Girl With the Pearl Earring. The Young Woman is mine — ours — the Museum’s, but that doesn’t influence my judgment. Good heavens, no; I’m actually praing that the Museum will sell the painting that is undoubtedly Vermeeer’s worst (what was he thinking?): the Allegory of Faith. (Even though I’m very fond of the tapestry curtain in the foreground.) My favorite Met Vermeer, more and more, is Woman With a Lute.

I almost bought Walter Liedtke’s plush monograph on Vermeer. I want it, certainly. But we’ve been spending money like water here lately, buying all the little things that will “pull the apartment together.” I doubt that Liedtke on Vermeer (as the book would have been called in more learned times) is going to go out of print anytime soon. I bought some postcards, and that was that.

Liedtke, by the way, speculates that the Woman With a Lute is waiting for a man to join her — a man with whom the spectator might identify. This seems truly peculiar to me. I see a woman who’s having a good time playing music in cloudy weather. I don’t see myself in the picture at all. Happily, I can’t possibly interrupt the music.

I had a choice of routes back to the Great Hall, which I would have to cross, in order to get to Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium, where Edward Arron and his colleagues would be playing chamber music. (That was all that I knew; I hadn’t bothered to check out the program ahead of time. I’d bought the tickets months ago. That’s why I almost didn’t go. In a perfect world, there would be no need to buy anything ahead of time; you could just wait to be in the mood.) I could go through the Medieval Hall or through the Greek and Roman Galleries. I was in the mood for Greek and Roman, but, in the event, I never paused to look at anything there, because, in order to reach Greek and Roman, I had to pass through the multi-purposed wing that, for the moment, I’ll call “Aztec.” This is a part of the Museum that I don’t know at all, and am indeed unpardonably sniffy about. But I was feeling expansive. Someone I knew might want to see something in these galleries, and I ought to know where they were (call me Teddy Wharton). I was feeling so comfortable and pleasant and mentally enlarged that I decided to do the Aztecs a favor, and have a look at them. Horrible to put it that way, but, in the end, that’s what living with art comes down to, and don’t let ’em tell you otherwise.

Because it’s way past my bedtime, I am not going to chatter about the Aztecs. The gold items were luminous and intriguing, but they were also impossible to look at without thinking of Indiana Jones… The silver items, however, were very fresh. There are two vases — not intended as such, perhaps, but that’s what we’d treat them as — that really ought to be copied by Tiffany; I’m sure they’d sell like hotcakes. Very simple, very Thirties — only, better than Thirties. You have to see them. Of course, I do live under a rock. It’s entirely possible that Renny Reynolds and Robert Isabel cloned them decades ago, and that, even as we speek, Palm Beach hostesses are trying to persuade their housemaids to accept them as bonuses. As you can see, though, my visit to the Aztecs was not without interest.

I’d thought that I’d have dinner somewhere afterward; I’d even brought reading matter to sustain me at a table for one. I ended up coming home, though, and making spaghetti alla carbonara. What I really wanted was the roast chicken at Demarchelier, but, when I passed by, the restaurant seemed not only packed but attitudinal. What can I say? I’m always comfortable at La Grenouille, one of the grandest restaurants in the world, but Demarchelier persistently reminds me that I live on the wrong side of Lexington Avenue. And Third Avenue. And Second Avenue! Turn the glass over, and I live on the wrong side of East End Avenue as well. Demarchelier is an Upper East Side restaurant. I live (four blocks away) in Yorkville. Maybe the Aztecs had exhausted my cultural imperialism.

But I’m just like you in this respect, I had as good a right as anybody to check out the Aztecs.

The weather was awful yesterday, unseasonably cold and miserably wet — although not quite as miserable as the same weather will be in March or early April, when the novelty factor has been stripped away. I ought to have stayed home and done a thousand things that need doing, but I couldn’t stand another day of domesticity, so I went to the Museum.

¶ Matins: George Packer reminds us Why Vietnam Matters, and receives a sad letter from Rufus Phillips, the adviser who tried to shout down the groupthink about Vietnam in Kennedy’s White House.

At the Museum, I discovered that I really ought to have stayed home. The place was packed, and, as always, the more people there are in the Museum, the more slowly they move. Most of them, naturally, have no idea of where they are or of where they’re going. Every move is inflected with uncertainty, especially when maps aren’t consulted. The cafeteria was jammed; I wasn’t at all sure that I’d find a table of my own. When I did, I found myself next to a nursing mother, embowered in a chatty family. I did not linger over the book that I had just bought upstairs in the gift shop — having failed, rashly, to port along a magazine.

¶ Lauds: Critics agree — Damien Hirst can’t paint.

After lunch — which, to be brutally honest, was the whole point of the Museum visit — I teetered on the verge of going back home. Indeed, I didn’t stay long. I saw the two big shows that are up at the moment, and I didn’t go anywhere near Vermeer’s Milkmaid — a big show in some ways, but not in size. The Art of the Samurai is going to open soon, but at the moment the  big shows are American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life 1765-1915 and Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans.

¶ Prime: We’ve been waiting for this story for so long that we actually forgot all about it: Electronic stock trading, which can be located just about anywhere, has perhaps mortally dented the action on the New York Stock Exchange and its European counterparts.

The Frank show was too crowded to enjoy; I sashayed through the rooms in a getting-acquainted state of mind. I’d have taken in the show that way anyway, but I was extra express. Frank’s photographs have never moved me in the way that Walker Evans’s do, and a lot of the images seemed, glaringly, to miss William Eggleston’s color. That’s to say that, as the photographs are documents rather than compositions, there is something false about the black-and-white, which is not only arty and un-American but missing the riotous vulgarity of the American scene. There’s no gainsaying, however, that Political Rally — Chicago, 1956 is one super-duper photograph.

¶ Tierce: In case you didn’t have all day, yesterday, for the Scocca-Gessen bout, Christopher Shea not only summarizes it but evaluates Mark Greif’s underlying article.

I’ll have more, I hope, to say about American Stories. I’m trying to figure out a way to write about shows just like it — exhibitions that I visit five to ten times during their stay. What I want to convey is a sense of the temporary collection of pictures, and American Stories gets a boost from the recent Americans in Paris, in which at least one of the new show’s very best paintings was also shown. Mary Cassatt painted it as a thank-you gift, only to have it rejected by the giver. She ended up calling it Lady at the Tea Table, but it is in fact a portrait of Mary Dickinson Riddle. Riddle’s daughter, Anna Scott, who had given the Cassatts the gilt Canton service that litters the tea table, thought that her mother’s nose had been rendered too large, so the picture went back to the discouraged painter. Decades later, it was appreciated as a masterpiece, and it is one of the relatively few great paintings to have been given to the Museum by their creators.

¶ Sext: A profoundly un-green solution to a wintry problem:

Luzhkov is a long-time proponent of fighting clouds by spraying liquid nitrogen, silver, or cement particles into the cloud mass, which forces precipitation to fall before it can reach the capital and spoil holidays like Victory Day and City Day.

(via The Morning News)

I almost fell in love with Lady at the Tea Table at the Americans in Paris show, but there was a distraction. Standing in front of the Cassatt (where it hung in that show), I had only to turn to my left to gaze at my true love, The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, the almost perfectly square Sargent that hung in the next gallery. (The difference between height and width is half an inch.) It seemed obvious that Daughters was the best painting in the world, period. Making do, I’m now inclined to find in Mrs Riddle — possessor of the clearest blue eyes that I have ever seen in a top-drawer painting — the subject of an extravagantly wonderful picture.

¶ Nones. In Monocle, Matthew Brunwesser urges Turkey to expunge the infamous and totally un-European Article 301 from its constitution; insulting a nation may sound like a bad thing, but the power to enforce sanctions against deprecation is more than most mortals can handle. More about the crippling Dogan Yayin fine  from Stephen Castle and Sebnem Arsu at the Times.

As I’ve said, Lady at the Tea Table belongs to the Museum. It hangs in the American Wing — currently closed for renovation and set to open in 2011. I’m sure that I stared at it in its native ground. But I never noticed it, not really. This is something else that I want to talk about. Every show has a greatest hit (not that everybody agrees what it is — I’m only talking about my view here). It has nothing to do with ranking; one doesn’t look for runners-up. The contest is nonetheless intensely relative: to win, the greatest hit doesn’t have to be the greatest painting in the world. It merely has to seem to be the greatest, in comparison with everything else on the walls.

¶ Vespers: “It may also be true that Michiko’s judgment works on the time-release principle of certain antacids…that hindsight makes the heart grow fonder.” Garth Risk Hallberg on Michiko Kakutani’s critical maneuvers, à propos of her very unfavorable review of Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City.

In a related way, pictures gain attraction by being moved around the Museum. For a few months earlier this year, Sargent’s Madame X was thrillingly hung at the end of the André Meyer enfilade. You could see her (if you were as tall as I am) from the top of the rise in the prints and photographs gallery that runs from the grand staircase to the Chamber of Horrors (think “Cot“). That is where Madame X belonged — in so many ways. At least she was there for a while.

Compline: The staff at XXfactor give Mad Men-style office drinking a try. Result: they have a fun day but are not creative. There don’t appear to be any adults on hand to tell them that they’re not in training.

If anybody asked me, which variation on the same thing is more interesting, La Gioconde or Lady at the Tea Table — but enough silliness. If you do get to the show, try to spend some time with Mrs Riddle. She’s an American fascinator.

Bon weekend à tous!

The other day, before lunch, before heading off to the storage unit for a bit of pre-shuffle straightening out, I had a long telephone conversation with a friend that touched on this and that but eventually circled around my objection to being said to have a philosophy. A philosophy of any kind. Also: I reject the idea that I belong to any community — not because I’m sort of loner (although I am a bit of a rogue), but because I don’t believe that communities exist. That’s not my philosophy; it’s just my opinion. I have loads and loads of opinions; in fact you might say that I have an opinion about absolutely everything; for, if I haven’t got an opinion about something, that’s because, in my not-very-humble opinion, the something isn’t worth thinking about.  

¶  Matins: At Chron Higher Ed, W A Pannapacker writes warmly about the “middlebrow” nature of The Great Books (1952). When a fellow grad student made a crack about his shelf of leatherette volumes, he put them away.

Eventually all of those beloved volumes were boxed, hidden in a closet, and replaced by hundreds of university-press monographs on literary and cultural criticism—mostly secondhand—along with ever larger piles of mostly unreadable scholarly journals. Of course, such acquisitions only affirmed my middlebrow-status anxiety, since so many of them were motivated by what I thought other people thought, rather than by my own interests.

Reading that, we thought: that’s what middlebrow is — attending to interests other than your own.

Opinions, yes; but no philosophy. “Philosophy” is not just an aggregation of opinions. It’s an earnest attempt to understand the world in systematic terms. Logical deductions from general principles are taken seriously by philosophers because the principles are thought to have an existence outside of the mind of anyone who holds them. This I stoutly reject. As a materialist, I believe in nothing that can’t be dragged into a laboratory for measurement. And that includes love, by the way. The fact that I cannot prove, in any normal, scientific manner, that I love my wife means, for me, that “love” does not exist on the same plane as “gravity.”

¶ Lauds: The Aesthete interviews Scott McBee, a storyboard artist who moonlights as the painter of nine-foot-long elevations of the great old ocean liners. (He hates cruise ships!) Before you reach for your wallet: his prices range from two to three times nine thousand dollars.

Toward the end of the conversation that I was talking about, my friend asked why I hadn’t just said that I was a materialist in the first place. I replied that I had asserted this so many times in the past, and so completely assumed that my friend was aware of my materialism, that I thought it heavy-handed to allude to the fact. (Also, I was in no hurry to end such a lively conversation.) 

¶ Prime: Felix Salmon agrees with Calvin Trillin: it’s the smarty-pantses what did Wall Street in. Banking is best done by the bottom third of the class.

One might argue that “philosophy” and “community” are mere abstractions, convenient carryalls for multiple instances of more of less the same thing (opinions, neighbors), but I reject that. What is interesting about my neighbors is not what we have in common, but what we don’t; and my bundle of opinions is free to evade all if-then constructions. I am not especially wilful or capricious. I don’t set out to be unpredictable. If a measure of consistency helps friends and acquaintances (and neighbors) know in advance what to expect of me, I won’t feel (as many men do) found out and exposed. But my mind is not a puzzle to be solved.

¶ Tierce: Have you got all day? Owing to household uproars, we missed this when it was fresh, but the correspondence between Tom Scocca (of The Awl) and Keith Gessen (of n+1), about an article in the latter’s publication, is as close to boxing as we ever get in the world of letters. In our view, the argument is never truly joined; Mr Gessen defends one of his writers, while Mr Scocca defends his ideas. To the extent that the exchange amounts to a discussion of the history of marriage, we’re inclined to agree with Mr Scocca — not least because we quail at the thought of being on his bad side, ever — but we admire Mr Gessen for not picking up the popcorn.

“Know then thyself” — I take Pope’s advice very much to heart. You really ought to know what you think. You ought to get to the bottom of you, as best you can. You ought to change what you don’t like about yourself, but only for that reason, and not because you’ve got notions that don’t “belong in the sentence.”

(Racking my brain for an example of intellectual inconsistency has led nowhere, probably because my intelligence has been set up to sidestep discomfort, not because I have no inconsistent ideas. I know that I have them, but I can’t think of any at the moment — a besetting sin. From the high horse of generality, I find it difficult if not impossible to pluck the agreeable flowers that grow by the roadside.)

(My friends, on the other hand, may not be as blocked on the subject of me as I seem to be.)

¶ Sext: It’s easy to spot the non-readers at craigslist, what with their Plato Toys and their Candle Operas.

In the wake of the conversation, my myriad opinions took on the metaphoric charm of expensive cigars, and I became a positive Churchill, exuberantly smoking them no matter who minded. I was very happy with this picture — not least because thinking of yourself as Winston Churchill after a certain age (sixty) is quite uplifting. By sixty, one hopes, you have given up on giving up on being young, and the idea of flourishing in your eighties or nineties becomes the sexiest idea imaginable. It sounds creepy, I know; but just wait.

¶ Nones: China’s billionaires. We have to lie down now. While we recover, discuss: are Chinese billionaires more or less likely to wind up in prison than their American counterparts?

My friend Eric Patton just wrote a lovely piece about altruism in the age of Spencer. Eric didn’t mention Herbert Spencer, or Spencer’s coinage, “the survival of the fittest,” but the resonance was there. Perhaps it was overly enthusiastic of me to do so, but I read the passage that Eric quoted, about altruistic Neanderthals, as expressing an important human ideal that was severely dented by the license to be selfish that Darwinism (especially in Spencerian hands) seemed to authorize in the Nineteenth Century and that still operates as a widespread intellectual default. (Chris Hedges’s chapter, in Empire of Illusion, on reality TV shows how set in vulgar concrete Spencer’s idea has become).

¶ Vespers: Thinking of reading something by Nobel Prize-winner Herta Müller? Only 5 of her 20 books have been translated from the German into English. This may be regrettable, but it’s not surprising. While non-Anglophones read more widely in translation, I shouldn’t be surprised to find that Anglophones prefer to read books in the original language whenever they are able. There’s something about English that mangles other ways of thinking. (via Arts Journal)

But what I wanted to mention about Eric’s entry was something else, slightly. “Many of us in the so called coastal elites are barely in contact with persons outside of a narrow band around our age, apart from our relatives (who we don’t usually live with) so we don’t even have to witness natural aging and death until it’s our turn.”

¶ Compline: Many of today’s problems are the result of an inversion: something that used to be scarce is now plentiful, but we’re still primed to seek more of it. Food is an obvious member of this class.  Jonah Lehrer considers another: information.

I wanted to mention this because, in my opinion, I’m an older person worth knowing. Yes! I am plugging myself. When I was Eric’s age, I knew a few crustaceans, and they were not remotely interesting as I am, especially since they smoked nothing like the expansive range of cigars (opinions) that I stock.  And if I do have a “philosophy,” it’s a passionate commitment to stealing not candy but attention from babies.

Dateline: Last night.

¶ Matins. A very good (if slightly biased) introduction to Vaclav Klaus — in case you need one — the heroic Czech anti-Communist (and would-be neoliberal economist) who is currently driving everyone crazy with his anti-Lisbon, anti-EU maneuvers. (via The Morning News)

A red-letter day; no two ways about it. Quatorze’s phone number available upon request (kindly supply references). The beautifully re-upholstered love seat came home this morning. I spent the rest of the day trying to provide it with the environment that it deserves.

¶ Lauds. The arts in a time of retrenchment: Landlords engage artists to soften their empty storefronts. Meanwhile, China’s art market is losing heat.

I ought to be exhausted. I must, in fact, be exhausted. But that information hasn’t reached the prefrontal desk yet. At seven o’clock I seriously doubted that I’d be able to compose this entry, but I rebounded after a meal of macaroni & cheese, salad and crisps, enjoyed on our restored 54″ glass tabletop (no need for place mats!). I had thought that I’d want to curl up with a glass of wine and a book, and maybe have a good cry, because, sheesh, I worked myself to the bone today; but, instead, me voici.

¶ Prime. Are you lying down? We weren’t, and we wish that we had been! Saudi Arabia thinks that we ought to pay for the oil that we don’t use in the interests of avoiding global warming. It has been making this argument since 1992 at least. All we can think of is Anna Freud on Identification With the Aggressor, our favorite “defense mechanism.”

The moving maneuvers in a nutshell: two guys from Meyers (a Bekins affiliate) appeared shortly after nine, and carted off the top half of the breakfront. Fifteen minutes later, their truck pulled up outside the delivery bay at the storage unit, but they declined to back in. Quatorze and I were standing on the quai, having already brought downstairs the other one of Kathleen’s grandmother’s love seats. Also a clunky DIY coffee table that I’ll never have to see again. The movers took these pieces away, leaving us with the top half of the breakfront, which we carted upstairs and locked into the storage unit. Then, for good measure, we walked two blocks up First Avenue. Peering down 64th Street, we saw one of the movers, standing outside the upholsterer’s shop. Concluding that all was well, we taxied back to the apartment, which the movers reached about half an hour later. It was all over by eleven. The moving maneuvers, that is. Then Quatorze and I got to work.

¶ Tierce. Life is a video game for my friend Jean Ruaud;  no, but it really is. The problem is, nothing in video games prepares you for the dangers of bathroom breaks. Jean’s entry can also be read as nearly exact précis of Kathleen’s thinking this evening (substitute “client” for “card”). Since you’ll have to read French to follow my point, you’re already on the same page.

At some point between noon and one, I realized that we had done all that two men could do, and we broke for lunch, at Café d’Alsace. Over croque monsieur and quiche Lorraine we talked about nothing but the ancien régime, which is our trademarked version of rotisserie football. Quatorze opined that things would have gone much better for the Kingdom of France if Louis XV had died as an infant, along with everyone else in his family except his great-grandfather, instead of surviving the smallpox for sixty-odd years. I couldn’t quite agree. Quatorze suggested that, as king, Philippe d’Orléans would have handled the Mississippi Company bubble better. I suggested that Quatorze read Niall Ferguson on the subject.

¶ Sext. The Grey Lady peers through her lorgnette at Cake Wrecks noting that things have got pretty meta. “Everyone in the baking business follows Cake Wrecks almost daily, if only to make sure our cakes aren’t ending up on there.”  

The first thing that I had to take care of, once I resumed work on my own, was the stereo system. This was not fun. I considered the offer made by the dealer who sold me a nice and very straightforward new amplifier: he could set it up for me! I was quite able to set it up myself, but if I were to pretend to be helpless, I would arrange for all the hookups to be optimized while, at the same time, providing myself with someone (else) to yell at when things don’t work. Is this devious?

¶ Nones. Jonathan Kurlansky writes, refresherly, about “democracy” in Thailand.

Having begun in the stereo corner of the living room, so to speak, I worked my way outward, until I subdued the locality. By 7:30, the living room was fit to live in. The foyer, on the other hand… 

¶ Vespers. New editor John Freeman answers three questions about the future of Granta. Nothing new whatsoever (except perhaps about the Web site, sort of), but we’re aware that not all of you read Granta, and we want to change that. Because what’s old about Granta, as Mr Freeman points out, is still pretty lively.

Tomorrow is another day!

What I really need, though, is another space-time contiuum. The foyer has become a refugee camp, crammed to the rafters with objects that have become homeless, stateless, de-cabinetized.

¶ Compline. A light-rail proposal for 42nd Street fails to interest Mayor Bloomberg, just as an earlier version failed to charm Mayor Giuliani. Because we expect mayors of Greater New York to act in this manner, we believe that a root-and-branch approach is required: fire the Outer Boroughs.

Kathleen, when she got home, admired the re-upholstery as much as everyone else who’d seen it. We all agreed that her late mother would have been pleased. Even. The apartment has never looked so grown up.

When I got back from the storage unit yesterday afternoon, I thought about running another errand, a quickie over to Lexington Avenue. I thought about it for five minutes — no more. As my body became aware of having returned home, it sagged like an ancient sofa. I was almost sick with fatigue.

¶ Matins. Chris Lehman writes so deliciously about Times coverage of service cutbacks endured by Harvard undergrads that we are forced to quote. “One shudders to think of how these euphoria-deprived pashas of the nation’s bogus meritocracy will forge onward in their post-Harvard professional lives.” Mad fun.

I had walked to the storage unit — 24 blocks. I had carried a driftwood lamp that became heavier with each block. I couldn’t believe my puny strength, but then I remembered how much heavy lifting I’ve been doing in the past week, especially since learning that today, and not next Tuesday, the love seat with ball-and-claw feet will be coming home from the upholsterer. Not in itself a big deal, but I’m taking advantage of having a mover on call to do some other shifting about. That’s why I had to go to the storage unit yesterday. I’ll want to be in and out quickly later this morning, something that wouldn’t be possible without a bit of preliminary clearing.

¶ Lauds. What would Vasari say? From ArtCat — where we can spend hours drinking in the prose, when we’re in the right frame of mind:

The duplicate spaces will develop incrementally along the same trajectory, but as the artists work, inconsistencies of touch, skill, and reaction will cause the workshops to diverge as a set of mutations emerge. Approaching an increasingly disconcerting, imperfect effect, the artists will engage the practice of partnership while confronting the impossibility of creating in true parallel.

On my way to the storage unit, I stopped in at the Hi Life for lunch, a club sandwich, fries, and an iced tea. Before the food arrived, my cell phone rang. It was a call from the decorator reminding me that the upholsterer would want to be paid. I hadn’t forgotten this detail, but I saw no point in bringing it up. By happy chance, the upholsterer is two blocks north of the storage unit. So I stopped in and paid the bill. The love seat was in the window, looking pretty gorgeous.

¶ Prime. The US Chamber of Commerce takes a dim view of legislation designed to reduce global warming. James Surowiecki writes about some big-name defections from the Chamber in his weekly New Yorker column; he also writes about the column.

The less said about the storage unit, the better.

¶ Tierce. John Eligon looks back at the trial that kept him busy for so much of 2009 — and taught him a lot about life in New York. Meanwhile, the Marshall twins (Philip “started it”) acquiesce to the diminution of their inheritance from their father, lately convicted of larceny.

When I realized that I wouldn’t be running any errands after my visit, I sank into the wing chair in the blue room and read Chris Hedges’s Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. If the gravamen of Mr Hedges’s jeremiad weren’t so well known to me, his book would be the most depressing read of recent times. His second chapter, “The Illusion of Love,” suggests a mortally serious rebuttal of David Foster Wallace’s far more jocular coverage of the AVN expo that appears in Consider the Lobster. Women are damaged, physically as well as mentally, in the making of pornography, and Mr Hedges will not rest until you understand that.

¶ Sext. The stories that Brooks Peters can spin from the humblest reading material! An old issue of Saga Magazine inspires a sketch of the short, racy life of Fon de Portago, which ended at 150 mph, as a bisected corpse.

Also very briefly, I considered making dinner. I rummaged through NoTakeOut‘s archives and found a lentil salad that I made a few months ago. I considered shopping for the one or two ingredients that I did not have on hand, and making that for dinner. Considering that I can barely walk across the room with complete confidence in my ability to reach the other side, there was a bone-deep stupidity about this home-cooking scheme, but I know whence it came. The apartment is about to become considerably more comfortable and smarter to boot. Of course I want to honor it with simple, thrifty fare! It’s a good thing that I also remembered that I don’t want to drop a lot of crockery in the kitchen, something that, in last night’s state, I should have been sure to do.  

¶ Nones. Kurdistan cuts off its oil, pending payment from Baghdad. If I weren’t taking the week off, we’d have something to say, but you can probably imagine every word of it.

When we came home from Panorama Café, we settled in the living room. I had thought about watching a movie, but it seemed wiser to potter, strategically shifting debris from sites of relocation to alcovial backwaters. Kathleen experimented with stitches for a blanket. Her experiment sessions bear an awful resemblance to the humiliating redactions that bigwig law-firm partners inflict on first-year memos.

¶ Vespers. John Self reads an erotic novel by the first director of the Louvre, No Tomorrow, now out in a dual-language edition from NYRB (it’s very short). John Williams tells us about The Story About the Story: Great Writers Explore Great Literature, an anthology edited by J C Hallman. Robin Sloan explains the Reetz-Clancy continuum of scanned books.

What am I going to do with all that “debris”? I can’t remember how I handled it in the old days, but now I play a game of musical chairs that sounds more like triage. I let everything find a place, and then the leftovers are tossed. At the moment, two rather nice (but not nice-enough) tables are at risk of heading to HousingWorks.

¶ Compline. Ian Baldwin writes about the importance of showing the Thames on a Tube map. You may not need to know where the river is in order to navigate the Underground, but you need it to tell you where you are in London.

I’m trying to remember how long it has been since the furniture in the apartment was rearranged in any significant way; I should say that it has been at least five years, and possibly longer. Age! When I was young, four or five times a year was the norm. Kathleen used to say that it was a good thing that she wasn’t blind, because, coming home late, the crashing into unexpected items would have finished her off. Now, in contrast, I had begun to think that everything had found its place for all time. And perhaps it had done so. But the decision not to reupholster a long sofa — more of a bench, really — but to let it go instead set off a chain reaction of alterations that has only just begun.

This will be brief, partly because I’m in the mood for a holiday, and partly because I found out this morning that the furniture shuffle is going to take place on Tuesday. I’m very tempted to announce, tomorrow, that the Daily Office will be suspended next week. If I don’t take the week off, it’ll be because I’m afraid of never going back to work.

The other “partly” is the fun I’ve been having at JibJab, creating “sendables.” I hadn’t given JibJab much thought since the 2004 election, but as anybody who subscribes to birthday notifcations knows, you can customize birthday and other greetings at the site. Last night, having drunk far too much tea in the earlier part of the evening and not feeling remotely sleepy, I capitulated to the request to send my latest birthday friend — Joe Jervis, of Joe.My.God — a JibJab offering. Loaded with caffeine, I found the patience to go through the sign-up procedure, and was I happy to pay the ten dollar annual subscription fee. Having chosen a cheesy card for Joe, and sent it, I went back to explore the scene of the crime, and in no time at all I discovered “sendables,” some of which can be “personalized.”

Once again, Facebook friends will be familiar with the results. I probably ought to have gone with the “Soul Train: Get Down!” solo, or, even funnier (with my head, that is), the “You Still Got It” card. But I fell for a drag act, “Chiquita.” I’m not sorry that I did, because when Kathleen got round to seeing it, she exploded —  just like Mr Too-Much-Magnesium: Crack! There is nothing finer in life than the big bang of Kathleen’s bursting out laughing.

This evening, I continued my laboratory experiments, and did a very fetching “Mexican Hat Dance” with Edith Wharton, who turned out to be a fine disco partner as well. Just a few minutes ago, the evening culminated (by fiat) with an “Irish Step” number featuring me (of course) assisted by Mrs Wharton, Queen Victoria, the Empress Ci Xi, and George Eliot. (I’d have asked Virginia Woolf to stand up, but her pictures all seemed to be in profile.) I might as well confess that the only other male head that I have invited into my workshop is that of Louis XV. I look better than he does in every JibJab scenario.

Sadly, I put so much effort into these ephemeral entertainments that I have no brainpower left for trying to explain the deeply delicious silliness of superimposing a staid head on a jitterbug body. It must have something to do with simple defacement — L.H.O.O.Q. and that sort of thing. And what about those perforated flats that allowed anybody, by putting his or her head in a hole, to become Napoleon or Abe Lincoln? Did those things have a name? There is certainly a cognitive dissonance thing going when Edith Wharton and I are throwing ourselves into disco extremities while keeping the straightest of faces. It is the humor of the incongruous — my favorite form of non-verbal humor.

A favorite moment: On Candid Camera, Alan Funt slaps a “Rest Room” sign on the door to a broom closet in a Broadway theatre lobby. There are buckets inside, but no… fixtures. The look on those faces, when they come back outside.

But that’s mean. There’s nothing mean about JibJab — except appropriating the faces of your friends. I counsel the greatest caution in that regard. It is almost certain that your friends will not find your dissonance as cognitive as you do, if you know what I mean. Stick to dead empresses. And have a great time laughing at the inner ridiculousness of you.

La journée de paperasse — that’s what today was. I don’t know if anyone born to speak French would put it that way, but a day spent with envelopes and catalogues — spent at the very bottom of the sea of intellectual life, in a stream of picayune decisions and stamp-pastings, paying bills and renewing magazine subscriptions, wondering if I can get Kathleen to see Hamlet and Wishful Drinking, or if I ought to settle for matinees; that sort of thing — requires the compensation of a bit of pretend glamour. 

If I do see Hamlet at a matinee, it will be the second time that I have seen Jude Law onstage in the middle of the afternoon, as well as the second time for seeing him onstage at any time of day. In Hamlet, I expect, he will keep his clothes on; in Indiscretions, lo these many years ago, the second-act curtain went up to reveal him wearing nothing but socks. The ladies sitting around me found this very distracting. I was reminded of the “wild on the beach” joke, the one about the male model who had to do something about his tan lines, covered most of himself in sand, and was espied by a once-sportive old lady, who ruefully remarked that, now she was too old to benefit from nature’s fecundity, &c.

They say that nudity on the stage is no longer shocking. I say that, if this were the case, actors wouldn’t go in for it. Nothing is more unnatural than public nudity, especially on the stage, where the appropriate reaction is no longer appropriate. A normal person is either going to be mildly disgusted by an actor’s undress, or else, less mildly heartsick. I resent all attempts to denature the naughtiness of nakedness.

Perhaps I’m the one who’s not normal. I have never gotten the fantasy thing down. Very attractive people make me want to start a conversation. Very attractive people who are falling out of their décolletage make me want to call for first aid — and not for me. I’m incapable of wishing for something that I couldn’t quite realistically have. Take time, for example. What I would wish for if I could wish for anything and have it would be a reversal of the speed with which time passes in life. It would fly by during childhood and drag deliciously decades later. But while such an arrangement would make a lot of sense, I can’t work up much enthusiasm for wishing that it were in place, even though, most days, I feel that I am circling the drain, with a surfer’s dispatch.

Wednesday already! If I hadn’t spent it on paperwork — if, for example, I had yielded to the very strong but evidently not overwhelming desire to watch the remaining two episodes of Body and Soul — I’d be frantic with guilt. I haven’t written a thing this week, and tomorrow’s schedule isn’t promising. I’m having lunch with a friend, and I’ve got an Orpheus concert in the evening. Another person might be capable of dashing off a few paragraphs during the intervening hours, but not I. The only thing that I could do with a couple of spare hours would be to finish looking over the contents of my in-basket. I’ll probably spend a quart d’heure or two wishing that I could go on a Viking River Cruise. 

I’ve just told Quatorze that it was one of the ten most productive meetings of my life. We sat down, after lunch, with blank legal pads, and when we got up a few hours later, I not only knew what had to be done (and what I had to do) between now and whenever the love seat with the ball-and-claw feet comes back from the upholsterer. As well as what ought to wait until afterward. The mover who picked up the love seat will be retained again (presumably). This time, the top half of the breakfront will be taken from the apartment to the storage unit, where the other half of the pair of loveseats that belonged to Kathleen’s grandmother will be picked up, and brought back to the apartment, via a stop at the upholsterer’s. Isn’t this fascinating? Let’s hope not. Let’s hope that I do the assigned homework and that absolutely nothing of interest occurs on the moving day, whenever that’s to be.

(Soon, though.)

Without our spending much money — almost nothing, quite seriously, on acquisitions; the reupholstery, a kind of maintenance, is what’s typical of our outlays — we’ll have a fairly different living area in a month or so. The big round glass tabletop, mounted on a stout pedestal, will take the place of our chaste but impractical late-Georgian reproduction dining table. The pedestal is currently doing yeoman duty as a side table; the glass tabletop is parked behind the breakfront. Once I’ve got the table set up, I’ll be able to invite up to eight people to dinner any old time, and if a few of them don’t show up, there will be more room (and food) for everybody else. I’ll be able to roast beef, pork, and capon again. I’ll bake cakes, knowing that less than half (at most!) of each gâteau will survive the meal. Dinner rolls! Soups! Stews! The dishes that serve five or more people are the ones that can be prepared ahead of time, or left to cook slowly for an hour or two. I’m longing to make them again.

Meanwhile, because the round table will be much too big for Kathleen and me to sit opposite when we’re alone, I’m going to move our smallish Pembroke table into the foyer, right ouside the kitchen door, and have a go at lifting the wings of an evening and serving dinner for the two of us on that.

There was no time for farther remark or explanation. The dream must be borne with, and Mr. Knightley must take his seat with the rest round the large modern circular table which Emma had introduced at Hartfield, and which none but Emma could have had power to place there and persuade her father to use, instead of the small-sized Pembroke, on which two of his daily meals had, for forty years been crowded. Tea passed pleasantly, and nobody seemed in a hurry to move.

Small Mr Woodhouse’s Pembroke may have seemed to Jane Austen, but I’m quite sure that it was larger than ours.

A New York apartment of less than luxurious size is like a sailboat. Everything not only has a place but must be kept in its place, or insanity ensues. Taking things out and putting them away eat up a lot of one’s time, in addition to making one jealous of spinster aunts with nothing better to do. Even after twenty-six years in this apartment, I haven’t got the hang of it. I’m still stamping out the legacies of my suburban upbringing, with its chock-full deep-freeze and its walk-in closets full of paper towels. Not to mention the dishes that it was no problem to hold on to, even if they were rarely used more than once in a decade (not that I lived anywhere in my life for as many as ten years before this place). To make things worse, the houses that I grew up in were graced with empty bookshelves. It wasn’t that my parents weren’t readers, exactly; but they certainly weren’t amateur librarians. The fact that they could have been, that they had room for plenty of books, has confounded me for half of my adult life. I don’t have the room. It is not helpful to remember what my parents didn’t do with their built-in bookcases, empty of books. I have the books, all right, but — ! I digress. Small changes in the arrangement of small apartments can change the entire flow of daily life within them.

Another nice change in the coming shuffle will be the relocation of our good prints, to the selfsame foyer, where they’ll be much easier to look at than they are in the blue room, where clutter makes it difficult to get near to almost every bit of wall.  This will make room for a print that I bought last spring, on the installment plan, from The Old Print Shop; it will hang in the vicinity of another one, by the same artist, that I have loved living with for over twenty years. 

Meanwhile: who’s going to take the “Edward” wine glasses from Williams-Sonoma off my hands? Will it be Ms NOLA, who has first dibs? Or will it be Fossil Darling, who, just the other day, spontaneously announced the need for new stems. “Funny you should mention that,” quoth Quatorze…

Ms NOLA dropped by on Saturday afternoon. She had had dinner with us the night before, but only on Saturday did she remember to tell us that our favorite Chinese restaurant, Wu Liang Ye, was closed. She’d noticed, walking by it on 86th Street. The restaurant closed once before, a few years ago (anywhere between five and ten — or more), with “Closed For Renovations” written on the brown paper that blocked the windows. Kathleen and I didn’t believe it, because experience had taught us that “Closed For Renovations” simply meant “Closed,” but, that time, we were wrong, and Wu Liang Ye did re-open. The fresh brown paper that went up the other day, however, just says “Closed.” When we passed by ourselves yesterday afternoon, there was a quartet of folks our age standing outside the door — which an enterprising fellows from Wok 88 (a former competitor/survivor) had decked out with a sheaf of menus.

How dreadful. I was picking up the phone to call for a lunch special this afternoon when I remembered that no one would be answering the phone (I’d tried that when Ms NOLA spread the news). I called Lili’s Noodle Shop on Third Avenue, and their pork lo mein was fine — it was always better than Wu Liang Ye’s, to tell the truth — but my heart was heavy.

A few hours ago, a young man from the Video Room called. I knew what it was about as soon as I saw the caller ID. Our membership expires at the end of every October. This membership entitles us to twelve free rentals a year (one per month) and also free delivery. We haven’t been using the Video Room much lately, because I’ve accumulated a backlog of DVDs to watch with Kathleen. Even without the backlog, we probably wouldn’t be renting, and for the same reason that the backlog only grows: Kathleen is knitting like mad. That’s to say that she’s experimenting with different stitches and patterns, and so can’t take her eyes off what she’s doing. We can always watch a Hitchcock or a Woody Allen. But movies that Kathleen hasn’t seen are out.

But the reason for our declining rentals has nothing to do with Netflix, which I’m sure is doing something like grievous bodily harm to the Video Room’s business model. As far as I’m concerned, Netflix is no substitute. If I want to see an old Japanese movie that hasn’t come out on DVD — A Geisha is a fave — or the Cary Grant – Carole Lombard “solid soaper” (Leonard Maltin), In Name Only — Netflix isn’t going to be worth diddly.

I renewed our membership, and the young man told me that he would send over the monthly freebie coupons right away. Hermes himself would not have appeared at our door any faster. As I signed for the coupons, something fluttered to the ground. A menu had been wedged in our doorframe. Ordinarily, menus are slipped under the door, but I saw in a moment why this one hadn’t been. It was printed on plain paper, not stock. I recognized the typography, too. Although it now calls itself Wa Jeal, the Wu Liang Ye people have decamped to a storefront on Second Avenue — not far from the old Pig Heaven, I should say, and possibly in that very space.

My training as a lawyer both invites speculation as to why the move (now that we know that it was a move) had to be conducted on such cloak-and-dagger lines and fills my head with explanatory scenarios. The menu stuck in the door frame — I now believe that menus were delivered to regular customers, not, as is the custom, leafletted throughout the building — reeks of the kind of “non-compete” constraint that made it impossible, for example, for Kathleen to advise her clients that she’d be moving from one law firm to another. The clients weren’t Kathleen’s, they were the old firm’s. Barbers and beauticians are bound by the same rules.

In the case of Wu Liang Ye, the “old firm” wasn’t, obviously, the 86th Street restaurant, which has completely shut down. We’re not talking about a chef’s departure, or a manager’s. It looks as though the entire operation moved a few blocks south. But Wu Liang Ye is actually chain of restaurants, with its original location, I believe, in Shanghai (PRC). There is in any case a Wu Liang Ye in midtown, not far from Grand Central. And one must not forget that “It’s Chinatown, Jake.” I’m actually delighted to see that the closing of the 86th Street shop didn’t involve a Saint Valentine’s Day massacre (a drowning, say, in Newtown Creek) I look forward to giving the new? management a call.

Here’s an idea, I thought. Pick a topic in the morning — when topics sprout up on every page of the Times — and think about it, off and on, as a sort of theme for the day. Then you’ll have something to write about at bedtime.

So that was the idea that I’ve been thinking about today. Yes, it’s a bit meta. And if I were to summarize my thinking in a theme for the day, it would be I Can’t Think. I can’t think, that is, unless I’m doing something else, like ironing napkins.

Ironing napkins saved my sanity in the late morning. I had half an idea of walking over to the Museum and having lunch in the cafeteria, and then looking at the Robert Frank show. But there was so much to at home — even though I’ve been doing stuff at home for what feels like forever. There is always more. Seeing that I was about to tip into a compleat tizzy and start foaming at the mouth (this happens), I also beheld the pile of damp napkins at the foot of the bed and decided that I would get rid of them. By ironing them, of course.

And so I just did. I unfolded the ironing board and I turned on the iron, as if this is what I had been planning to do. In actuality, rapeling up the side of the building would be easier than planning, in the state that I was in. Intricate networks of priorities were crashing.

I really am very worried for the safety of President Obama. I mean this seriously and sincerely. It must be fun to laugh at wackos like John Perry, but frankly, I can’t manage so much as a tepid “heh.” Something that Adam Gopnik said about the Dreyfus Affair in a recent New Yorker has lodged in my mind.

In any modernized country, the backward-looking party will always tend toward resentment and grievance. The key is to keep the conservatives feeling that they are an alternative party of modernity. (This was Disraeli’s great achievement, as it was, much later, de Gaulle’s.) When the conservative party comes to see itself as unfairly marginalized, it becomes a party of pure reaction, which is what happened to the French right after Dreyfus. Instead of purging the anti-Semites, people on the right decided to rally behind them. They came to hate the idea of the Republic itself. When Maurras was sentenced for collaboration after the Second World War, he cried, “It’s the revenge of Dreyfus!” It wasn’t true. But Vichy had been four long years of the revenge of Drumont.

Not to mention Thomas Friedman’s “where’s the we” piece, comparing the United States today to Israel on the eve of Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination.

Ironing napkins, in such cloudy conditions, is therapeutic: eventually the pressed febric convinces you that everything will be fine. It convinces the dumb part of your body that doesn’t understand what the prefrontal cortex is so worked up about but can tell that there’s a rumble. As for the prefrontal cortex, ironing calmed it down as well. Apocalyptic visions yielded to the urgent longing for an intern.

When I ask myself what I would look for in an intern, I answer right away: personable youngster who needs a year off to reconsider that future in pediatric medicine. Someone who loves kids, and the grandpas who act like them. (Where’s my tea?) Actually, I would arrange for Kathleen to interview candidates (of whom there would be many, I’m sure!) On the eve of our 28th anniversary, Kathleen has a fair idea of what it takes to “assist” me.

Yes! We’re celebrating another anniversary! 28 seems sort of dinky, though. It’s a lot, but it’s so not 30. Not to mention one of those really big numbers that you can reach only if you marry in high school. This year, Kathleen has decided that she would like me to buy her a piece of jewelry — but not just any jewelry. I’ve been sent an array of Web pages published by the shop that wraps things up in blue boxes, and I’ve got to run down tomorrow morning and buy the one that I like best. That way, there’s an element of surprise — but only an element. Kathleen, like Scottie Ferguson in Vertigo, certainly knows what she likes.  

If I was going to be running to midtown tomorrow, then I might as well go to the movies in midtown as well, even if the Paris Theatre doesn’t sell popcorn. No popcorn! And should I really be going to the Museum today? Whatever will I do? What’s to become of the rest of the day?

I wish I could say that I thought about any of this. 

Last week, I was so productive. This week, not so much. Not at all.

I know that I had an interesting idea for this entry when I got up this morning; I ought to have written it down. Later, I did a bit of cooking. I used the grinder attachment to the Kitchen Aid stand mixer for the first time in several years, possibly ten. I had been organizing the top of the cabinets, and the Le Creuset terrine looked so forlorn that I resolved to make a pâté maison, using Mrs Child’s recipe in The Way to Cook, as soon as possible. I’ve been moving so slowly, however, that the ingredients that I bought on Sunday almost exceeded their cook-by date. (The result seems tasty enough.) I also baked a quiche, this time remembering to toss in the cheese. Cheese is not a canonical ingredient of quiche — quiche Lorraine, anyway — but it makes a big difference. Forgetting the cheese two weeks ago produced a quiche that I can only describe as non-dairy. There was milk in it, yes; but isn’t milk the most non-dairy of dairy products?

I’m horribly distracted, these days, by the conviction that the world has taken a bad turn. (It’s probably just fatigue.) I worry a lot about the day when the guys at Con Ed wake up and just don’t give a damn about whether we have any power. That day seems foretold on almost every page of Chris Wickham’s The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages (which I hope to write up tomorrow). I always pray that I won’t be in the elevator.

On a positive note, Megan’s pregnancy has entered its third trimester. My daughter is blooming; she is one of those expectant mothers who makes carrying a child seem like the most wonderful thing that a person could do. Not the most “natural” — she’s not at all obnoxious about it. In fact, she has begun to find the climb out of the subway, in the morning commuter rush, a bit of a trial. But it’s definitely wonderful: I do envy the little one. His mother is definitely going to love him; there’s no doubt about that. But/And she’s not going to love him too much. She’s not going to be a needy mom, not at all.

Maybe I’m quiet because I’m loudly aware that neither of my grandfathers, if they could see me now, would acknowledge that I’d grown up by so much as a day, since they walked the earth (in the mid-Fifties). I still wear short pants, and I don’t have a job! There’s being a grandfather — which can just happen, if you have children — and there’s being a “grandfather,” which, actually, I expect to be rather better at than either of them were willing to be. One was too dashing to be a grandfather; the other was too cantankerous. And neither one of them knew how to change a diaper. They would have considered it indecent to be in the same room as a naked infant. Perhaps our sex-offenses laws have brought us full-circle on that one.

Whether my grandfathers liked babies, I can’t say. I rather think not. I do like babies, though, enormously. The better part is — and I’m hoping that my grandson won’t prove to be an exception — that babies like me. I make them laugh.

All I could think of, this morning, was the testosterone replacement piece that cost Andrew Sullivan his job with the Times. “Antlers”! What was I thinking?(How much was I drinking, is more like it — we had been out to dinner with an old friend.) All I knew was that I couldn’t bring myself to read whatever it was that I’d written. I still haven’t.

This decision was facilitated by the fact that it was all that I could do to read the 584 feeds that had accumulated, like mushrooms, on my Google Reader page. We had what is known as “a long day.” I wasn’t put out; I’d been firing on all cylinders for four or five days, and was due for a collapse, or at least a lie-down. Until this year, I’d have spent the day reading. I might not have gone near the computer at all. But now I’m a professional. So I had “a long day” instead.

At the end of this long day, utterly devoid of incident worthy of report, I found myself at a loss for a concluding paragraph until, just a moment ago, I read the following paragraph in the Book of Cake (explanation to follow):

In April 1917 Albert Einstein wrote from Berlin to a friend in Holland of the way in which nationalism had altered the young scientists and academics he knew. “I am convinced that we are dealing with a kind of epidemic of the mind. I cannot otherwise comprehend how men who are thoroughly decent in their personal conduct can adopt such utterly antithetical views on general affairs. It can be compared with developments at the time of the martyrs, the Crusades and the witch burnings.

And how right he was. At least he took his own advice, and contrived to die at Princeton, and not — somewhere else, earlier.

After lunch, I threw on some trousers and ran a couple of errands. Stepping outside, I was surprised (as one always is, here) by the latest bit of striptease. The caissons had been pushed back from the driveway to the doorway, so that we can now walk across the broad terrace that will soon be our entryway. Only yesterday, and the day before that, when those barrels stood in the driveway, forming a very narrow passage, I found myself engaged in sizing-up exercizes with guys who were headed in the opposite direction. Now, that walkway has been erased, leaving a vapor of unreliable memories. There is plenty of room for everybody, and the calculus of do-I- or don’t-I-forge-ahead will be forgotten with relief. It was interesting while it lasted, though. I was bigger than the other men, and older, too. My eye was still sharp, and from years of living with “oblivious” princesses I had learned not to be outwardly cognizant of potential difficulties.

At the beginning of the third act of Siegfried, Wotan waits on a hillside for a token but determining battle. What has always interested me about this scene is Siegfried’s impatience: the old man (whom he doesn’t recognize, having no reason to do so) is an interruption in his program, which is to climb the mountain and see what there is to see. Wotan, for his part, is fulfilling a bargain, making it as difficult as he can for an intruder to violate the chaste imprisonment into which he immured his daughter (Siegfried’s aunt, as Anna Russel never tired of pointing out) several generations ago. I often feel like Wotan, obliged against my will to prick young men into acting like gentlemen, ever ready to be told that my services aren’t wanted. We love the old men with whom we have grown up, but we dislike all the others. Old men are truly a pain in the wazoo.

I wish I were young — oh, do I ever — but if I told you why, you wouldn’t believe me. Of course I’m going to tell you! I wish I were young so that I could do my homework, so that I could take advantage of every educational opportunity that was dropped in my lap when I was young. I wish that I could atone for my sinful derelictions in language labs: I would be able to speak French fluently today if I had been more diligent. I wish, in short, that I could have been sixty when I was eighteen. I wish that I had spent my entire life being sixty, because being sixty has really been working for me — well into being sixty-one! And yet — or perhaps it’s ipso facto — I find that I am more physically competitive than ever, ready to sweat the small stuff with other men at the drop of a hat.

I’ve learned something from the older guys as well. The older guys are older. Life used to be great for them, but it isn’t any longer. They wear the failure of jeunesse like a cologne. This is where coming into my own at a very late age sets me apart from my cohort. It also reminds me that, when were all fifteen or twenty, I hated the schmucks. I’m glad that they’re feeling old and useless; they had it coming.

And they say that antlers are for cuckolds. Nonsense.

Because the weather was going to be unseasonably warm today, I planned on going to the movies. If I stayed home, I probably wouldn’t get any work done — for the second day in a row. Now that I’ve emerged from my estival depression, temperatures in the high seventies are totally unendurable (and it was supposed to be even warmer today). I’m done with that for 2009. Tomorrow is supposed to be lovely — perhaps even a tad brisk. I’m looking forward to a productive day.

(Which is foolish, because almost any contretemps can disable the higher functions that allow me to write with pleasure.)

The only movie showing that a) I hadn’t seen or that b) wasn’t out of the question — there seems to be an awful lot of animation (9) and dystopian fiction (District 9) on the city’s screens at the moment — was The Burning Plain, about which I knew nothing more than what IMDb could tell me, which wasn’t much. Charlize Theron, check; Kim Basinger, check. Joaquim de Almeida would have been a check if I’d remembered seeing him in Clear and Present Danger, but I didn’t place his name. Other prominent members of the cast have done a lot of television work, but that only means that, as for me, they might as well not have bothered.

I wasn’t looking forward to The Burning Plain, which I’ll be writing about tomorrow, but I loved it; more anon. When I got home, I was so demoralized by the humidity (and by not being able to reach Kathleen, momentarily) that I read A O Scott’s review of the film — something that I wouldn’t ordinarily do, for the simple reason that I might spoil my write-up by thinking too highly of somebody else’s. The danger in this case, however, proved to be entirely hypothetical. Beginning with this crack,

… which opens in theaters nationwide on Friday after spending about a month as a video-on-demand insomnia cure.

Mr Scott launches a seriously nasty review — as well as one that isn’t particularly funny. (Gloriously savage reviews that make me howl with laughter are my guiltiest pleasure.) As if the weather weren’t depressing enough, the review lowered my spirits even further. Why publish such nastiness? You can always say, “I didn’t care for this movie,” or “It wasn’t for me.”

But those movies, which were directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, balanced their silly conceits with some seriously good acting. (Mr. Arriaga’s best script, “The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada,” was directed by Tommy Lee Jones, who also starred.) In this case, with Mr. Arriaga in the director’s chair for the first time, the acting is merely serious.

I don’t think that it’s crazy to say that Kim Basinger, always a luminous movie star even if you wouldn’t particularly want to see her play Shakespeare or Racine, may have done her best work ever in The Burning Plain. Again: more anon. What’s offensive about A O Scott’s review is its jerk-off presumption that no intelligent moviegoer could possibly enjoy the movie as I did. What kind of cool club is he striving to please, by pissing off the filmmaker, a regular reader, and Charlize Theron?

Second Avenue, by the way, was a parking lot, thanks to UN Week. I would never have gotten to the Beekman if I’d hailed a cab. I’d still have been in it two hours later, when I walked back home.

This week, I’ve resumed listening to Teach Yourself Dutch on my daily walks — which I have also resumed, on a minimum-of-twice-weekly schedule. I had taken a few walks in August with my pop shuffle (see “Endless Summer“), and I expect to take a few more, but the arduous business of learning foreign languages is what autumn is all about, at least for cosmopolitan intellectuals such as myself. French is the language that I ought to know, but Nederlands is the language that I wish I could speak, because I think that it is my homeland language. I have not given up on the idea that I might find myself living in Amsterdam someday. Everybody in Amsterdam speaks English, but I would not let that get in the way. Angenaam kennis te maken!

So I walked over to the river and what did I see, but this Coast Guard vessel (pictured, above and below, left — the lower image is simply a detail) parked in the middle of the East River. It was that what-d’you-call-it moment when the tides aren’t running one way or the other. It took me a while (I am not the brightest bulb in the box) to realize that the ship was there to guard against terrorists who might want to launch a bazooka at the United Nations headquarters from their Chris Craft. Then I really paid attention.

The players are all in the crop. The Coast Guard vessel, stately and off to one side, guarding against Iranian aircraft carriers — or maybe French ones. I understand that. The large ship’s disinclination to engage in the contretemps that bothered the smaller boats was right out of Ms Gaskell, or perhaps early Trollope. It was hard not to think of dogs. Sniffing. Just look!

The police boat (blue hull) steamed up, as it were, from downtown to have a look. For a while, it flashed its overhead light, just like a cruiser pulling you over. But it accomplished nothing. It was the grey and orange slip (another Coast Guard vessel, I hope) that finally, after I really can’t tell you how many feints and false resolutions, sent the white pleasure craft on its merry way down the East Channel. Young people deciding whether to have sex for the first time cannot have been more tentative than these sailors. 

And I thought: let’s just let them blow us up. It would be better than this nonsense. If we have to park idiots out on the East River to deal with other idiots who know that they oughtn’t to be cruising down Moon River while the UN is in session — well, clearly, these guys are not going to protect us from the brains who could blow us all up in a trice. 

Make no mistake: I admire the Coast Guard vessel (the Ridley) for staying out of whatever was going on over there — which, for all I know, was a confab between a security officer and his brother-in-law — hostile, but not Orange Alert.  But I’ve been reading Chris Wickham on the Dark Ages, and learning that when security becomes our most important product, you might as well give up and ask the Taliban in.   

On the way home, I stopped in at Gristede’s to pick up a few things for dinner, but, as always happens when I go off-shopping list, I found when I got home that I’d have to go out again. This time, I went to the Food Emporium, which is in the building, facing Second Avenue. When I turned the corner, I almost fainted. The row of lovely Bradford pear trees were gone. I knew, right away, why: to make way for the construction of the 86th Street Station of the Second Avenue subway. But it was another example of heavy-handed violation of the fabric of civil society, and even less necessary than protecting the United Nations from rogue pleasure craft. I’m still heartbroken; I probably won’t see those trees again in my lifetime.

After dinner, as I was ironing the napkins — not my favorite job, but somebody’s got to do it — and watching “Music to Die For,” the second episode of the second season of Lewis, the great successor to Morse — my dear Kathleen, her back to the screen, her attention ostensibly fixed on the purchase of baby clothes for the little one, blurted out, “She’s the murderer.” I thanked her very much for reminding me, you may be sure. (All I remembered was that the fantastic Cheryl Campbell has a part — I even forgot that she was playing a German!) What was worse, deeply disingenuous Kathleen immediately claimed that she might have been mistaken. Don’t say, “Oh, I’m sorry for spoiling your suspense!” Say, “Maybe I was wrong.”

Like bloody hell — and at least I didn’t fall for it. Kathleen is always right about whodunits — she never forgets. She knows whodunit even when she hasn’t seen the movie before; there’s a Hollywood job in there somewhere. (Fool Kathleen and they make you change the ending, because nobody will find it plausible.) When her gross lie was revealed at the end, and I told her what a horrible person she is, not only for giving away endings but for trying to cover up her indiscretions, she ran through her repertoire of adorable gargoyle faces, and I had no choice but to forgive her. It’s hard not to love a basilisk who thinks she’s a comedian.

We will draw a veil over her claim that I used to be even worse….

That’s not a misspelling! It’s the Scandinavian for “pirate.” I have always wondered what kind of word “viking” is, and what it means — and now I do, thanks to Chris Wickham!

In addition to providing a more convincing explanation of  the “decline and fall” of the Roman Empire than I’d have thought possible (after all the murky ones that I’ve read), Mr Wickham has a way with the scant relicts of Early Medieval Europe that maybe just as deformed by current outlooks as history at any time is likely to be, it is a way that makes sense. Consider his take on the remains of the Northumbrian palace complex at Yeavering:

We are not so far from [Hadrian’s] wall here, and Roman material culture was thus at least physically available to the Bernicians [as the Northumbrians were known]; but for Anglo-Saxons living north of the Roman province of Britannia deliberately to adopt a Roman-influenced construction for something as emblematically Anglo-Saxon as a public assembly point sheds considerable light on royal aspirations, particularly because it seems to predate Christianization, which would make Roman influences more obviously culturally attractive. Indeed, this may go some way to explaining the readiness of Anglo-Saxon rulers to be converted relatively quickly.

In many cases, as here, Mr Wickham simply turns conventional wisdom around, and we see that the history that we were brought up on was the history of the Nineteenth Century, applied to earlier eras.

***

I’ve been reading The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000, with the greatest interest. Chris Wickham is a gifted writer who can make almost anything seem interesting; if he’s hard to follow at times, it’s only because one doesn’t have his ready grasp of the difference tetween BCE 500 and BCE 700. To must of us, there’s no difference at all; nor is there much more difference between the dates that bracket Mr Wickham’s period.  At the level of simple visualization, most educated people can distinguish the look of the Reformation from that of the Enlightenment (even if they can’t recite any specific dates), because they have some traction on what happened between 1500 and 1750 What’s dark about the Dark Ages is our blanketing ignorance of them.

***

When Kathleen travels, I never make promises to gods that I don’t believe in to be a better person in this or that way if she is returned safely to me. I’m not wired for that (which may explain why I don’t believe in gods). Instead, I think of all the things that I won’t do anymore if she doesn’t come home. Kathleen has always returned, so far, without my having become a better person; but I’m quite sure that I should be a worse one without her. Perhaps that’s a false prophecy, but I have no desire to put it to the test.

This time, she returned with her mother’s jewelry. Laid out on a length of white cloth, it looked like something that might have been dug up at Yeavering — not in style, of course, but in its slightness. Except for the most extravagant regalia, women’s jewelry is, for obvious reasons, normally small, and especially small-looking when arrayed on a cloth. The lovely brooches had the vulnerability of tiny birds. The pearls, although entirely correct, had a pagan opulence that seemed vaguely archeological. But the rings — and what is more regal and symbolic than a ring? — were a puzzle.

I remember my mother-in-law as a wearer of power rings. Not the bizarre extravaganzas that my own mother wore on her very long fingers, but quietly serious jewelry that looked exactly as valuable as it was — and no more. (Although an Irish Catholic from Long Island, my mother-in-law was a genuine tai tai.) But the power was evidently in my mother-in-law, not in the stones. Aside from a handsome knob of enamel and gold, none of the rings was at all impressive on Kathleen’s hand.

How can we be surprised, then, that the imperial self-confidence of Hadrian’s time, once shaken off, took fifteen hundred years to retrouver?

A good day, lots done — it began, really, last night, when I went to the Museum with Ms NOLA. I had a ticket for two to a members’ preview for the new small show, The Milkmaid. Built entirely around one not-very-large Vermeer, on loan for a month or two from the Rijksmuseum, the show gathers the five Vermeers that the Museum already owns (only two of which really compete with The Milkmaid — although I’m very fond of The Woman with a Lute) together with a few other thematically related pictures by Ter Borch, de Hooch, and so on. The paintings don’t begin to fill the available wall space, which gives the show an air of desperation that we may learn to see as something else.

The Milkmaid isn’t the picture that I should have chosen to borrow from Amsterdam — that would have been The Little Street, a picture that I must have looked at for twenty minutes when I stood in front of it, in 2002. The milkmaid has always made me feel uncomfortably warm. She seems to be perspiring, and her jacket looks like a corset. But Walter Liedtke’s bulletin-length essay, which I was reading earlier this evening, is increasing my appreciation. I’m learning to regard the milkmaid as chaste and serene.

The Milkmaid, which I’m pretty sure I saw often as a child, on the walls of older people’s apartments, also makes me feel uncomfortably stifled, as if I were living in a room whose windows could not be opened. When I was little, chaste serenity was not much of an attraction. It would have been beyond me to suppose that the serving girl hated her job and felt underpaid, but I could see that she was expected to Be Good. I associated being good with frustration. You could try all you liked, but you would never, ever want to Be Good. It goes without saying that Being Good involved fantastically unnatural behavior, such as Sitting Still and Being Quiet. And wearing excruciatingly itchy wool trousers. As a sort of not-really reward, Being Good featured the  bonus-points feature called Offering It Up.

This will sound like a child’s complaint about the relative dullness of adult life, but as I saw it, the adults were the real sufferers. They had simply given up, capitulated, lowered the drawbridge and allowed tedium to overrun the citadel. Adults could no longer help Being Good. Their artificial smiles would always make horror-film zombies look amateurish by comparison. You can still see the kind of meaninglessness that I’m talking about in the smirks of society dames (never the heroines) in movies from the early Thirties. These women were still living in the Twenties.

You may think of the Twenties as a decade of gin, jazz, and chrome, but it was in fact the terminal moraine of respectability. Moated by Prohibition, the American home attained unimagined levels of stupefied entropy. The choice of colors was limited to sepia and écru. Your mother’s hemline might reveal a bit of darkly-stockinged ankle, but from there on up she was either a scarecrow or a Hefty Bag stuffed with down pillows.

The silver lining in all of this came from living in the Fifties. Ordinarily, I think a child might have dreaded the future, horrified by the doom of growing up to become a replacement for these older people. In the Fifties, though, it was clear that Nothing Was Going To Be The Same. The drawback to this silver lining was that it made the old people who were going to stay the same seem dead while they were still alive. They were already as chained to Yesterday as was Vermeer’s milkmaid.

My mother-in-law passed away this morning, between eight and ten o’clock. She was formidable and exacting, but we all got used to that a long time ago. There is a ghastly ripped-out hole where she used to be.

When my own, my own adoptive mother died, I had just turned 29. We were on pretty good terms toward the end, as she shuttled back and forth between M D Anderson and the house in Tanglewood. Two months before she died, she asked me if I would do a dinner party for her. There were two couples whom she wished to entertain. Of course I was very happy to do it — amazed, really, that my culinary ambitions were no longer a dirty secret (a boy who wants to cook!). I don’t remember what dishes I prepared, or whether I joined the others at the table (I like to think that, feeling profesional, I didn’t), but I do remember that it all went very nicely, even though it was obviously odd: my mother was already such a shadow of herself, physically, that she might as well have been sitting up in her casket.

Whatever the guests made of the occasion, I knew that I’d been recognized. Not accepted, perhaps; I don’t think that my mother could ever accept me, even if she knew me now. Her idea of big strong men was fairly blinding and closed to nuance. Later, when my father told me that he and my mother had (latterly, at least) assumed that I was homosexual, I had to smile at the easiness of the packaging: as awful (to them) as homosexuality must have been, it was preferable to inscrutability. I don’t think that it ever occurred them that, as the child of other, unknown people, I might, as a matter of course, be inscrutable to them. I was at least, finally, recognized as such — inscrutable, much as the United States was recognized by the signatories to the Treaty of Paris, in 1783.

Then my mother died. As I said the other day, I was overcome by paroxysmal sobs when I saw my mother laid out in her casket, dead dead dead. Yes, it was her — but it was also death. I learned that that’s what happens: death is a body snatcher that replaces the person you knew. The person you knew is gone; the imposter in the casket makes you want to throw up, or scream.

I got over the hysteria pretty quickly. But ten years would pass before I would feel firm about regarding my mother’s belittlements as wrong. I would come to understand why she belittled me, but I would never forgive her. They say that that’s bad — that you really ought to forgive. I couldn’t agree more, if what you’re talking about is resentment. I don’t resent the way that my mother treated me. I simply refuse to excuse it. I don’t “hate” her (whatever that means). I don’t wish that she’d been taught the error of her ways in some dramatically satisfying way. (“All I want is ‘Enry ‘Iggins ‘ead!”) I know that she thought that she was “within her rights.” But I also know that, when it came to meaning well, she could be lazy and self-serving (I remember being shocked, as a teenager, to discover that, although my mother had lots of rules, she was governed by no principles.) So I refuse to say that she “meant well.” That’s what not forgiving her amounts to. It’s a judgment, and, having made it, I’m done. I talk about it too much, I suspect, but what I’m talking about, what I’m trying to get right, is the quality of being done.

As for my father, I forgave him everything — I was a slut of forgiveness. It’s rare now, but he still does occasionally spend time with me in a dream. He is always smiling and wise and patient and fond of me. He was all of those things in real life — but he was also (and this I cut from my dream dad) completely at sea about fatherhood. He might as well have been standing there with the manual in his hands, disconcerted by an unhelpful index. There was no entry for the likes of me, and he didn’t find “weirdness – general” particularly interesting. But although he could be very stern from time to time, and extremely clear about the obligations of a gentlemen — which never sounded fussy or prim, coming from the son of placid Clinton, Iowa that he was (I’ve even forgiven Clinton!) — he never made me feel like a reject.

I’m already older than my mother was when she died, and about ten years younger than my father when he died. I have come to believe that I understand the world at least as well as my parents did — which is to say that I’m  no longer invested in trying to convince them that they were wrong about it. I’d much rather convince you that what they were right about — all that they gave me — hasn’t been thrown away.

Exit Kathleen — to North Carolina. At about two this afternoon, she had a phone call from her father, and learned that her mother’s decline has accelerated. Before seven, she pulled up at her father’s door. (At three, she appeared at the apartment, with a car downstairs waiting to take her to the airport, and threw — and I mean, threw — some clothes into a suitcase. She had the only remaining seat on the only unbooked American Eagle flight to Raleigh-Durham.) Hustle and bustle, and then an unwonted stillness.

The flight was scheduled to take off at 4:25. When I hadn’t heard from Kathleen by ten of five, I concluded that she had taken off more or less on time, and I set out on a walk. The plan — a success — was to stay out until about the time for her touchdown. I hate sitting at home while Kathleen is in the air almost as much as I hate flying myself, and I can alway use the exercise. But I wouldn’t be very imaginative. I took my ordinary route, which my feet can follow without executive input, and when I’d completed my loop through Carl Schurz Park and along the Finley Walk, I kept walking west, to hit up the ATM machine for some cash — I’d given what I had to Kathleen. Crossing Third Avenue, I notice a scaffolding pasted with a sign for Burger Heaven — the upper floors of the building in which the branch is situated are being renovated — and I realized that I’d forgotten all about Burger Heaven.

Not to worry; it was just another sign of my summer depression, which this year, at least, I’d harnessed and exploited. As the weather gets warmer and hazier, my body slows down to the Slowest Possible Denominator. I simply saw to it that I spent this immobile period seated in front of the computer in the only room with supplemental air-conditioning. It was a hugely productive six or seven weeks, but I was still depressed — or, to use the fancy term, in estivation. Rarely leaving the building during daylight hours, I forgot about lots of simple things, eventually. Such as the presence of a Burger King location on Third Avenue, next door to the Orpheum.

I’d had big plans for the day: I was going to write up Sam Shepard’s story in The New Yorker, which I read at the barber shop this morning, and I was going to clean out the refrigerator. The refrigerator is not in the dire state that usually compels clean-outs, but it’s crowded, with half-empty jars of semi-useful substances. Leftovers. I’m quite sure that I’ll find some unusably wilted green beans. I was going to write about that, too. I was going to write about the dinner for three that I made on Friday — our young art-student friend came by to tell us what he’s been up to. I hadn’t cooked for three during the estivation period, as I several culinary stumbles reminded me.

(For example: I was going to accompany the chicken sauté (one of the best I’ve ever cooked) with angel hair pasta. The angel hair pasta is kept in a canister that stands behind the spaghetti canister, so the two canisters were both standing on the counter when the water reached a boil. I was chatting with Devin and sipping white wine — and presently I was wondering what the hell was taking the angel hair so long to cook? And how’d it get so thick?  In the end, we ate truly al dente spaghetti — at the very punto of inedibility.)

I was going to do a lot of things today. But Kathleen’s trips always diminish the quality of the light, and this trip has made me feel that my Persephone has been summoned by her mother to the underworld. The very air is clotted with inanition. I’m glad that Kathleen is where she really does want to be right now; the long-distance perch was vexing her. But I can’t wait to have her back.