Boy, did I overdo it. What I thought would be a Sunday dinner of several courses was instead two Sunday dinners, one served right on top of the other.

As usual, I prepped a chicken for roasting, on Saturday. I spatchcocked it and tucked wads of tarragon butter beneath the skin on the breast. Then I wrapped up the bird in foil and stuck it in the icebox. Everything was set for a normal Sunday dinner. Kathleen and I would eat the legs, and I’d cut up the white meat for salads.

But I had a slightly belated birthday present to give to Fossil Darling, whose principal virtue is his fixed relative antiquity. That is, he is permanently eighteen months  older than I am (all right, seventeen). Forever. Unalterably. When were were thrown together at boarding school, eighteen months — or even seventeen — was a significant percentage of my age, more than 10%! So I persist in thinking of Fossil as considerably older. He used to be considerably more mature, but I let that pass. The thing is, I wanted the box out of my house. To make sure that he came and took it away, I offered him dinner. He accepted.

Then I went to the store. My appetite was running to an unseasonable mushroom dish, preferably involving ravioli. This would be the “starch” course. Then I would serve the roast chicken, quartered nicely, and complete each plate with half of a stewed heirloom tomato. Lemon tart to finish. Agata & Valentina was selling packets of good-looking chanterelles, so I bought one and supplemented it with a packet of buttons. I meant to buy a tub of veal stock, but I forgot to, so I stopped in at Gristede’s on the way home and bought a quart of College Inn “sirloin” beef broth — a product that I hadn’t seen before.

I chopped the mushrooms and browned them in batches (having learned this trick, not even knowing that it was one, from Julie & Julia). When the mushrooms were cooked, and had left a nice deposit on the bottom of the sauté pan, I softened a couple of sliced shallots in butter and then deglazed the pan with vermouth. So much for preparation. I returned the mushrooms to the pan and added a cup of the broth. I kept adding more broth as it simmered down, until the box was empty. Then I added a small quantity of cream. Oh! and fresh sage leaves, which I did not cut up, thinking that, like dill, they would hold up through the cooking process well enough to be easily removed when the sauce was finished. (Wrong — but not fatal.)

Only later, after everyone had pushed the chicken disconsolately about the plates, did I realize that the ravioli course contained the business end of a quart of sirloin steak essence. My little ravioli primo would have made a fine dinner by itself, with maybe a little salad afterwards and then perhaps some cheese — and then the tart. Far more interesting than the sequel of roast chicken. Although it was delicious, it competed with the sirloin, and lost. The mushroom-ravioli sauce deep, rich, and complex. It made the chicken routine and — just plain heavy. 

Another thing that didn’t strike me until later was that it had been a long time since there had been four people dining at the table. The occasion might have been a first for 2009. I’m not saying that I was out of practice. If anything, the time lapse intensified my sense of having cooked far too much food. It wouldn’t have happened if I’d started out, mentally, with the ravioli. I’d never have thought of throwing in a chicken dish as well. But I began with the chicken, and throwing in a pasta dish seemed absolutely normal.

Absolutely normal because I wasn’t really thinking.

Kathleen took yesterday off, so that she could see Julie & Julia with me. Determined to prevent my seeing the movie without her, she also knew that I would never agree to await her convenience. There’s more to it than that: I simply won’t go to the movies after 1 PM at the latest. I’m at my best, movie-goer-wise, before lunch and in an empty theatre.

We got the Orpheum — just around the corner — about forty minutes before show time. There was already a line (of one). When the movie finally got rolling, after yards of pathetic ads and mis-matched trailers (Roland Emmerich as a Nora Ephron appetizer?), the auditorium was at least half-full, a truly remarkable turnout. Trust me: I should know.

After the movie, we returned to the apartment so that I could change into clothes more appropriate for Midtown. We weren’t going to Midtown, but to a neighborhood widely known as Lenox Hill but that I increasingly think of as “Little Mad,” because so many stylish shops seem to have have abandoned Madison Avenue for the stretch of Third between 72nd and 79th. Because of the glorious weather, Kathleen wanted to have lunch outside; and, because of the movie, I knew that the only restaurant for me was Orsay, on Lex at 75th.

If you’ve already seen Julie & Julia, and you’ve been to Orsay, you’ll know why. It’s a matter of lace curtains, etched windows, and vaguely art-déco paneling. The food is very good, but the food is very good at a lot of places; and in any case, food wasn’t the point. After two hours of watching a movie about food and cooking, I was eating with my eyes.

Some movies are very seductive. Chinatown, for example. For days after the first time — the first couple of times — that I saw Chinatown, it was hard to know whether I was living in Los Angeles in the mid-Thirties or Houston in the mid-Seventies. It wasn’t that I had a preference for one or the other. At a deep, emotional level, I was confused. Eventually the confusion wore off: powerful as they were, Roman Polanski’s visions of California were no match for Houston’s weather. A more recent seduction was accomplished by the markedly unseductive De battre mon coeur s’est arrêté (The Beat My Heart Skipped). For a few days after that introduction to the magic of Romain Duris, I didn’t really know French from English.

You would expect Julie & Julia to seduce me, and, once upon a time, I’m sure that it would have done. Instead, though, it posed a kind of reckoning. Pointing a finger right at me, the movie wanted to know what I had done with my life. As an ageing blogger beset by the conviction that he is on to something, if he could only figure out what it is, I hardly knew which woman’s predicament seemed more like my own. I may not have been seduced, but I was certainly confused, and, as usual, this meant that my eyes were in a state of spillover.

I will say this: happy and supportive marriages play the leading supporting role in Julie & Julia. So I was hugely grateful to Kathleen for taking the day off, and making sure that I did not discover the movie without her arm linked through mine.

It wasn’t the lack of access to Twitter that made me cross today — and I was very cross. Kathleen tried to talk me out of being cross at dinner, but I replied that she could make all the excuses that she liked, that I’d considered them all, and that I had rejected them. She, at least, recognized the fearful aspect of the denial-of-service attack (inadvertent though it may have been).

Boy, was I ever in the mood to see the Bacon show! I was cross enough to carve up a few carcasses myself. At least I wasn’t mumbling to myself. If I’d been mumbling to myself — given how cross I was — I’d have been given a police escort somewhere. At one point, I did wonder how I came to be at the Bacon show. I’d only gone out for a walk. To talk pictures for next week’s entries. Yes. I’d dipped into Central Park; and then, in need of a lav, right out again. Out of the Park and into the Museum.

The crowds at the Museum were not exactly mood-enhancing. And then to find that the escalator was out of service! I ought to have turned on my heels and gone home. Instead, I climbed the great staircase. Once at the top, I couldn’t think of anything better than to duck into the Bacon show, which I’ve already seen a few times. I looked carefully at a couple of the canvases, but mostly I just harmonized with them. Inside my head, there raged a sanguinary blizzard of intemperate thoughts about heedlessness, inattentiveness, and smugness. And wrongheadedness, while I was at it. I never imagined that I’d think of Malcolm Gladwell as wrongheaded. But in fact I did, this afternoon, and quite intemperately. He’s wrongheaded, that is; I’m the intemperate one.

But in cases where the status quo involves systematic injustice this is no more than a temporary strategy. Eventually, such injustice requires more than a change of heart.

And if the response is also systematic, then you can easily end up with a room full of Bacons — and no paint necessary! The only alternative to a change of heart is (literally) excoriation.

 

Today was not quite so focused on work. I paid the bills, for example. In theory, paying the bills should require nothing more than slipping five or six sheets of checks into the printer and pressing a button. In theory, I open each bill when it arrives and type in the amount due, in Quicken. In practice — well, there is no practice, but we’re moving in the right direction. Last month, practice approximated theory very closely. This month, not so much. When I sat down with the stack of envelopes this afternoon, only two of them had been opened — the two that always arrive first. Excelsior!

(If you’re thinking of recommending something called “electronic payments,” don’t. Ghastly experience has taught me that I am too old a dog to remember to open virtual envelopes.)

Having paid the bills, and with dinner completely under control — once again, Kathleen named a time and a dish (and, once again, it came to pass) — I thought that I might work on some Portico pages, and this turned out to be interesting. That’s Chinese for “a bad idea.” Meaning to add one line — just one line! — to a draft that I wrote yesterday, I realized that I’d altogether missed the point of the story that I was writing about. Yikes! As for the other page, the one that I had to write from scratch, it was a dog’s breakfast. Happily, the virtue of having paid the bills cast a rosy glow over these disappointments. (Not to mention that hot rush of intaken breath, occasioned by grasping the wisdom of not adopting a contrarian position vis-à-vis the New Yorker‘s fiction editor.)

Before I paid the bills, I caught up with my online reading — which is to say that I read the latest entry at SORE AFRAID. Eric Patton writes about his recent (third) trip to Jerusalem. Among other things, he and his friend Asaph visited the Holocaust Museum.

We took an English tour, and the guide — a middle-aged woman with an oddly cheerful and eccentric manner about her — spoke into a microphone that transmitted a signal to headphones worn by everyone in our group.  As she led us through the exhibits, she didn’t really look at us as she spoke; she just talked into the air.  I understand that there is no universally accepted theory for why the Holocaust happened, but our guide kept throwing out odd bits of information that only made the terrible events even more baffling: “Hitler’s mother was very nice!”  “Hitler had barely ever met a Jew growing up!”  “The Nazis were not initially elected because of their anti-Jewish views!”  “There were almost no religious Jews in Germany!”  Do these things just suddenly happen, out of nowhere? I wondered.  That was the implication of our tour guide.  Everything can suddenly change and then the most horrifying atrocities will be committed by neighbors against their neighbors.  It is a frightening thought.

The genius of this paragraph is that the horrible uncertainty that’s explicitly stated at its end infuses it from the start, beginning with “oddly cheerful and eccentric manner,” and steeping thereafter. That the passage is also funny only tightens the screws. At the end of the entry, I was almost weeping. I felt that my day had changed somehow.

(And yet, as Eric himself certainly knows [he has been!], the suddenness of neighborly atrocity is a hallmark of what happened in the former Yugoslavia, over and over again, after the death of Marshal Tito and the collapse of the Soviet Union.)

My day had, specifically, changed with regard to my literary scruples: if I was less fastidious about the stories that I was writing about, I was much more fasticious about my own pronouncements. And it had become the sort of day when paying the bills is a lighthearted sort of pastime.

A good day is like natural gas: it burns without leaving a residue. A good day for me, that is. The following list, of things that will not show up, one way or another, at one of my sites, will show why.

• I took a walk. (yay!)
• I made a BLT for lunch (necessitating the walk).
• I ate leftovers for dinner.
• I saw to the minimum personal and housekeeping chores (ie, I got dressed, I made the bed).

Everything else that I did, from the moment that I bent down to pick up the Times at the front door until right this minute, had something to do with — let’s be grandiose — amplifying my presence on the Internet. When I wasn’t reading or writing, I was commenting at Facebook or looking at tweets.

And now that I look at the list, I’m reminded that I’ve never written up my method of making BLTs, which yields sandwiches as good as if not better than the best that the city has to offer; so that may not belong on the list.

And it’s more correct to say that I took the walk because I was feeling very antsy after lunch. A letter that I wrote to a friend documents this. (Ought the letter to a friend be on the list of things that won’t show up on one of my sites? All too evidently not!) The walk restored me completely.

***

I spent most of my life afraid of the kind of work-commitment that I’ve made to Portico and The Daily Blague. I feared that such a commitment would choke all the fun out of life. And it probably would have done. By waiting until the Internet and then the Blogosphere got themselves invented, I was enabled to professionalize all my amateur interests — by which I mean nothing more serious than dealing with them on a regular schedule. I’m as moody as ever, but my moods have a lot less to do with how I spend my time. And the worst mood of all has been downsized from cumulonimbus to cirrocumulus. That would be my fear of not writing well.

That’s my abominable conceit for you: what I mean, really, is, the fear of not writing well enough. It will never go away altogether. There will always be projects that pose peculiar, rather occult difficulties. (It’s usually a case of wanting to write about something that I haven’t properly digested.) But the determination to sit down and have a preliminary go at something meets with a lot less resistance than it used to do.

I suppose I always knew that “practice makes perfect” would prove to be true even for me. What I never guessed was that even I would come to prefer doing the hard and boring site-related stuff to doing anything else. Oh, I don’t always. Not yet I don’t. But that I should ever prefer the hard and boring to the diverting surprises me greatly. I thought that I was missing that mental component.

***

The secret, I think, is to resist the sense of look how far I’ve come! As if I had arrived, once and for all, at some desirable position of self-mastery. It’s the moments of self-mastery that come to me — when they do. Tomorrow could be a howlingly bad day. Last week amounted to no more than a stretch of dented fender, thanks to brief but dismaying server and cable outages.  Far from having found a safe harbor, I’ve exposed myself to a greater array of adverse contingencies; when I was a dilettante, far fewer things were crucial. And I do miss that. But I’d miss what I have instead a lot more.

As Kathleen was getting ready for work, she announced that she would try to be home at 9:30. That was amazing enough, but it didn’t stop me from saying that compleat happiness would be mine if she would only tell me what she’d like for dinner. Like most people who don’t cook, Kathleen has a difficult time conceiving of dinner when she has just brushed her teeth after tea and toast. But she struggled valiantly, and was able to ask for “grilled chicken and a salad.”

Although I spent most of the afternoon talking about art with a with a young man who has just arrived from California to study at the Grand Central Academy of Art, and notwithstanding the many clever and memorable remarks that were made by one or the other of us, what I want mention this evening is an earlier exchange with Nom de Plume. Briefly, Nom de Plume said that I am late-blooming artist. Whatever I am, it’s certainly late-blooming. But an artist? I was uncomfortable with that. Nom de Plume is used, by now, to having her compliments deflected as if they were bullets, but I do wonder, generally, how women put up with the cantankerous blend of humility (I’m not good enough to be an artist) and grandiosity (Let me tell you what I really am) that I’m not the only guy on the block to manifest.

It’s simply this: when I was growing up, writers were not artists. They were writers. The idea that a novel was somehow comparable to the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling was laughable. After all, anybody with a few years of grade school knows how to write.

As I say, cantankerous blend. Writers knew that they were better than artists. Compared to writers, artists were idiot savants, congenitally incapable of saying anything intelligent about their work. Which is why there had to be art critics — writers. Writers could explain the hokum.

Show me an American writer who doesn’t believe, in his heart of hearts, that he is really William Demarest, and I’ll show you somebody who belongs at a quilting bee.

Only a moment ago, I was sitting here with nothing to say — a problem that, for me, unfortunately, is not a problem. Then I got an email from Ms NOLA that saved everything. Kathryn Stockett’s first novel, The Help is “the sleeper hit of the summer,” according to USA Today. I should point out that Ms NOLA is at JFK, waiting to fly off on vacation.

The Help is one of the handful books that I’ve been asked, as a blogger, to read in advance. When I say “handful,” I mean “the fingers of one hand or fewer.” I was very careful not to discuss the book with anybody before its publication date. Except for a few friends, to whom I gushed that the book was going to be huge. And I do honestly hope that The Help will be huge. It deserves to be! A book of many threads, its story of a privileged white girl’s struggling to encourage black housemaids to tell their stories without fear of reprisal is nothing less than electrifying! Plus, it features one of the most hateful society witches in American fiction, and we can only regret that Madeleine Kahn did not live to play Hilly.

But enough about The Help. What about the anxiety of influencelessness? I wrote it up in February. Nobody listened to me when I said that The Help is a fantastic American novel, spanning from popular to highbrow.

Before Ms NOLA’s email, I was blathering on about how my personal weather today ranged from Content to Happy, and how boring that was for Dear Diary purposes. Indeed! Thank heaven I’m not happy or content now! The worst of it is knowing that, when you finally do get round to reading The Help, you won’t be thanking me for the recommendation!

Anybody who tells me six months from now that A Meaningful Life is a really great novel is going to get socked. Unless I’m thanked for the recommendation, that is.

This afternoon, I took a spontaneous walk. It has been a very long time since my last planned walk, and spontaneous acts of any kind have been uncommon. Ever since the beginning of the year, I’ve been living in a sort of wartime state of mind, prepared to sacrifice everything to the production of four Daily Office entries a week, and three or four Portico pages as well. And that’s the minimum. I have no idea what the maximum ought to be. Taking Sundays off has proved to be not entirely satisfactory. Not since law school, thirty years ago, have I lived with the same overhanging cloud of responsibility: there is never a time at which I ought not to be working on the blog.

Meeting the minimum, though, has gotten to be, if not easy, then panic-free. I don’t worry about reviewing the Book Review. I just sit down and do it, and in not very much time. Lately, compiling the Daily Offices has taken on an inner logic, as I’ve come to recognize the kinds of follies and stories that it seems worth my while to follow. Knowing what I want to do is pacing only slightly ahead of knowing how to do it.

Hence the restlessness that drove me out of the apartment shortly after lunch today. I had gone downstairs to collect the mail on the early side, because if The New Yorker wasn’t in the mailbox I wanted (a) to discuss the problem with the mail carrier, if she were still around, and (b) to run across the street to buy a copy at the newsstand while it could still be had. The magazine was waiting for me, and on top of that cheering development was the arrival of a doodad that I bought a few months ago, long before it was released for shipment. I keep calling it a “tail pipe,” but its manufacturers call it a “tap line.” It allows you to use any headphones you like with your iPod Shuffle. Don’t ask why, in addition to the eight or nine Nanos in the house, I own a Shuffle. The purchase was a mistake. But there are things about the device that I like quite as much as I hate the headphones that came with it. Which you must use if you intend to adjust the volume or pause the playback. So, now that I had my tail pipe, I was suddenly in the mood to give it a spin. I was hoping that “It’s a Sin” would come up in the rotation, and it did.

I’ll write about why I’m crazy about the Pet Shop Boys some other time; basically, the band’s output belongs in a stream of European pop that is a lot closer to classical music than anything produced in the United States. (I have never liked real rock-‘n’-roll any more than sports.) By the way: I’m listening, right now as it happens, to the Overture to Bach’s Fourth Orchestral Suite (my favorite of the four; but on this playlist they all come up), and every time the brasses punctuate the slow-and-stately parts (as distinct from the skipping, contrapuntal parts), I’m viscerally shocked by the reminiscence of Rufus Wainwright’s song, “Slideshow.” If you know the song, you’ll recall the thrilling eruptions of brass that seem to claw down a prize from heaven. Before Release the Stars, the Suite wasn’t reminiscent of anything except itself. It ought to be the Rufus song that’s reminiscent, but I paid attention to it, from the first time that I heard it, to a degree that I didn’t attend to this part of the Bach, anyway, until after I knew “Slideshow.”

The weather was grand, considering the heat, which was well above my comfort zone. As if heralding a storm (which might well have hit somewhere else), the air was blustery and, along the River, reminiscent of a wind tunnel. Or it would have been if I had ever been in a wind tunnel.

***

In addition to the walk, I read two stories. One of them, Joshua Ferris’s “The Valetudinarian,” I had to read, since among those Portico pages that I’m committed to composing every week is a write-up of the week’s New Yorker story. I loved Then We Came to the End, Mr Ferris’s big novel of 2007. I didn’t love “The Valetudinarian,” and in fact I’m not sure that I understood it. I’m also unsure about “A Day’s Work,” the Katherine Anne Porter story in the Library of America volume that I’m approaching dutifully. (Porter’s Ship of Fools had just appeared when the reading-for-pleasure lightbulb went on in my adolescent brain, thus marking her forever as someone whom I would read when I grew up. Here, ahem, I am.) The book has rested on the ottoman beside my reading chair in the living room since it arrived, but I’ve only read one other story in all these months. So my reading today was extra dutiful.

The story is very depressing. I don’t mean that it ends unhappily — I’m not really sure how it ends — but that it depicts a vanished New York that still gives me the willies. It’s the “New York” of my childhood dread. I lived in an apartment building on Palmer Road in “Bronxville PO.” Don’t ask me how I knew, but my sense of living at the high end of the range of middle-class apartment buildings stoked a scary idea of what the other end must be like, and that’s where the unhappy couple in “A Day’s Work” live. They quarrel in the clear understand that their altercation can be heard by everyone else in their building (on a Perry Street incapable of dreaming of Sex and the City) and in the one next door as well. The telephone is in the stairwell, and needs to be fed coins. The once beautiful wife takes in laundry, only to denounce its owners as sinners whom she wouldn’t give the time of day if her husband could keep a job. It’s the New York evoked poetically by Joseph Mitchell; by “poetically,” I mean that Mitchell’s evocation obscures the fact that most New Yorkers’ lives in those days was materially barren — which is not at all the same thing as “simple.”

***

Kathleen decided to work late at the office, and I didn’t know what to do for dinner. I wanted to order in, for the obvious reason that ordering in is very easy. But there wasn’t anything that I could order in that I very much wanted to eat. (A burger from Ottomanelli’s was very tempting, but I knew that I’d be disappointed.) So the matter was settled by an avocado in the vegetable basket. It was at its peak, and this created an urgency. I mashed the avocado with a quarter cup of plain Greek yoghurt, a dash of curry powder, and the juice of an entire lime — too much lime, I’m afraid. I tossed in a handful of cubed roasted chicken, a chopped, seeded tomato, and a load of cavatappi (one of my favorite pasta forms). The result needed something  — maybe cilantro, perhaps water chestnuts. But the fact that I hadn’t really fiddled over the salad contributed mightily to its flavor. When I was finished, I had to admit that, après tout, j’avais bien diné.

This will be very brief, because a brief is precisely what it is not going to be.

It took a while for the toxicity of last week’s now infamous Gates-Crowley encounter to hit me. The poison, for me, has nothing to do with race — but I didn’t see that for a day or so. President Obama’s suggestion that Officer Crowley might have acted “stupidly” reassured me, but what I wrote about it in the Daily Office last Friday shows whither my thoughts were listing. “Police forces also need a re-think,” I said, and I said it from personal experience with police officers, not from a background of racial prejudice. My experience with policemen has not been extensive, but in almost every instance it has stunk of the sour mutual dislike of the good-natured jock and the high-strung intellectual. Imagine two men who dance very well — gifted ballroom dancers — each an assertive natural leader in his own way. One excels at the tango, the other at the waltz. Now imagine them trying to dance together. Who’s the lady?

Don’t make the mistake of imagining that the high-strung intellectual is any better than the good-natured jock at packing away his testosterone. Consider, rather, that the high-strung intellectual regards himself as the one who doesn’t need a gun. He’s the one with the brain!

A constabulary worthy of the Information Age, staffed with a few low-strung but insightful intellectuals as handy with a keyboard as with a weapon, would go a long way toward bridging the rather abyssal divide between the men who imagine better societies and the men who protect them. I’m not suggesting that clever people are above the law. I’m just wishing that more clever people were the law.

A couple of hours ago, while I was doodling at the computer in an intermezzo sort of way, there flashed a Facebook update from Andy Towle: “What are you doing tonight?” I’d tell you why I found this flabbergasting if I weren’t sick of talking about me, so we’ll just pass on to my replying comment. “I was asking myself what you are doing asking the question,” or words to that effect. I meant this to sound avuncular — what’s a nice kid like you doing polling your friends on a Friday night, when you ought to be out having fun. But I could see that my reply was open to many other constructions, so I deleted it and replaced it with the comment that’s still there: “I’m thinking that you’re too young to be asking such a question on a Friday night.” It’s still hopeless, but if I change it again I’ll look like a perfectionist.

If I were to change it again, I’d say that I was watching the last episode of Season Three of Lewis. Mad as I am for Mad Men, I’m madder for Lewis — the Oxford procedural that follows Inspector Morse. Robbie Lewis (Kevin Whately) used to be the sergeant attached to Inspector Morse (John Thaw), but now he’s an inspector himself, and his sergeant is James Hathaway (Laurence Fox). The great joke is that, having been bossed around by an Oxford-grad boss, Lewis is now bossed around by a Cambridge-grad underling (a theology student to boot!). As this series has progressed, however, Hathaway has become less prim and more assertive, principally in the swing of his shoulders. He is about a million times more buttoned-down than his father, James Fox, but only about ten times more repressed than his uncle, Edward. You almost dream of his remaking The Day of the Jackal. But you don’t really, because, self-controlled as he is, Laurence Fox projects no bitterness. Edward Fox couldn’t say “I love you” without sneering.

In the episode that we watched tonight, “Counter Culture Blues,” the magnificent Simon Callow, who was fished out of the Isis in the nude in the Morse episode, “The Wolvercote Tongue,” returns at the top of his game — perhaps even over the top. A delicious old queen who’s querulous about the wherabouts of the Randolph’s prettier bellhops, Vernon Oxe is determined to reconstitute a great Sixties band, the Midnight Addiction. Great fun! Much as I love Joanna Lumley, I knew that her Esme Ford was a fake.  (She was really the late Esme’s sister, Kathleen.) I also knew (as who did not) that someone would be thrown into the “macerator,” a toothy septic composter, but I assumed that the person would be dead, or too drugged to care. I certainly didn’t imagine that Hathaway would jump into it, or that Lewis would have an appalled moment of wondering if the man dragged out of it would require mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

As it has been a while since I have made this spiel, I’ll indulge: I’m very proud that Andy Towle is a Facebook friend. As chance would have it, his was the first blog to strike me as handsome, and worthy of emulation; if nothing else, it taught me that links needn’t be underlined. (Remind me to tell you why underlining is one of the ten things that I hate most about life on Earth.) Maybe it wasn’t chance after all — because I can’t think of any blogs that look better than Towleroad, and precious few that look half way as good. You wouldn’t be reading this — because there would be nothing here to read — if it weren’t for the inspiration of a very smart young man who, come to think of it, isn’t so young that he can’t appreciate the pleasures of a quiet night at home.

There was a story in today’s Home section that has bothered me all day. (I’m not the only one.) “After the Breakup, What About the Lake House?” is one of those optical illusions that shifts unstably before your eyes: is what you’re look at a vase, or is it a pair of profiles? Is it new and provocative, or is it garbage and a disgrace? The profiles in the Times story, as by now is legendary, were hung “facing” one another in the early days of the relationship, but at the eponymous lake house, they were hung the other way, as can be seen in an accompanying photograph. How symbolic is that? One feels that even Jerry Bruckheimer would blush at the obviousness.

So these guys were going to get married but by the time the party date rolled around they’d broken up, so that Bradford Shellenhammer paid his first visit to the house in ages. They had the party anyway, you see. The former lovers are working on being future friends. Meanwhile, they’re stuck with this house, which they decorated within an inch of its footprint — apparently exhausting their mutual attraction in the process.

Their tale of lost love has a familiar arc — love sparks, then blooms; lives intertwine; moments are lost and misunderstandings creep in; eventually the two begin to live as strangers — and an epilogue that has become increasingly familiar as well, as unwanted houses become prisons rather than cocoons.

This was supposed to be a story about the house, Mr Shellhammer’s blog informs us, but of course romance will always trump paint chips, especially when it’s the romance, and not the paint, that has faded. How could Timeswoman Julie Scelfo resist?

What has bothered me all day is the inability to explain my deep disapproval of this story, but, hapily, having been bothered about it all day, I have cleared up the confusion. You could say that the story is obnoxious — that the two gents are exploiting the end of their affair in the interest of dashing their story with a memorable piquancy. “Oh! Aren’t they the ones who did their house over in the style of the Brady Bunch‘s therapist’s trophy-wife sister?” According to this reading, Mr Shellheimer and Benjamin Dixon have pursued publicity.

That’s very bad, but in fact it’s so bad that it absolutely vaporizes any claim to one’s attention that these men might have had. Such a claim would rest on the theory that they allowed the publicity, in the interests of sharing their situation with Times readers, who might find the example helpful in some way. A public-spirited exercise, you might say. And in fact I do say. I believe that this is what the ex-lovers had in mind — to the extent that they had anything in mind, given the fact that their strange home near the Taconic has become a prison.

If this were the case, however, the men are transformed from reptilian publicity hounds into deeply shamed individuals. How could they let the world know who they were? Why wasn’t their story presented without names? I don’t mean “anonymously”; I mean “discreetly.” By all means, run the picture of those back-to-back profiles. Let those who are familiar with the silhouettes and their owners tell their friends. But I can’t not feel that Mr Dixon and Mr Shellhammer ought to have balked at identifying themselves with their painful loss of love. I can’t not suspect that the lack of pudeur now is the consequence of a lack of genuine affection back then.

 

As someone in the second half of his 62nd year, I’m appalled by the fact that the Internet has disinterred and revived a dreadful adolescent folly of my youth: the convinction that some people — a lucky few — are preternaturally interesting. Their slightest word is very manna. An email from B— or E— makes my day — even though very, very few days are thus made. In frequent fits of Stalinist self-denunciation, I convince myself that, in this way or in that way, I have gravely offended these Olympians. It’s entirely likely.

What makes it all so much worse is knowing that, if Facebook (and the Internet, &c &c) had existed when I was a teenager, I’d just about rule the world by now. I’d have insulted so many people in so many unforgettable, zingily toxic ways that money would be all that I could hold on to. This is why I spend hours wondering if I have offended B— and E—. When I was twenty, I was capable of amazing offensiveness, calmly and deliberately reminding victims (and informing bystanders) of disadvantageous revelations made in unguarded moments, twisting them for maximal linguistic éclat. Forty years have slowed me down, but I am still capable of the occasional appalling “observation.”

My mother (who was not my mother) used to say that I liked to tear the wings off of flies. For years, I kidded myself by dismissing this as her dimwitted resentment of my intellectual dispassion. But she was right: I do like something that I’m not supposed to like. Although I feel sincere when I say that I hate to see people suffer, this is the case only when I myself haven’t caused the suffering with the mocking troll that lives beneath my tongue, and that surprises and shocks me no less than it does everyone else.  

You’d probably like to hear an example of my “wit.” Almost immediately, though, you’d wish that you hadn’t. It isn’t so much a matter of bons mots as it is one of completely unscrupulous license: it isn’t what I’ve said, it’s that I even thought it, much less said it. All that you need to know now is that my way of honoring the remarkable people whom I meet is, all too often, to mortify them with my Mortemart wit.

Here’s what happened:

¶ Saturday: I forgot to turn off the window unit in the blue room before running the electronic broom (not even a vacuum cleaner!) over the carpet. This threw the  circuit breaker — largely because, I’m reminded, I’ve got a thousand peripherals plugged in in here. Not to mention the two monitors: it used to blow out when I had only one.

No big deal, but, with the power back on, the modem wouldn’t work. Big deal. Much sweating and agonizing between recognizing modem problem and, realizing that I ought to unplug the power supply as well as the modem, fixing it.

¶ Sunday: Uneventful, until —

¶ First thing Monday morning: Kathleen said, “By the way, the browsers on my laptop keep clicking through to some malware site.” The Malware Abyssal opened up beneath me!

¶ Last thing Monday night, the cable connection disappeared. If it hadn’t been for previous events, I’d have understood what was happening — a neighborhood-wide outage — but, instead, I was sure that I’d Done Something. I hadn’t, though; very late, I went to bed relieved to have a restored connection. (Meanwhile, thank heaven for Mi-Fi!)

¶ Tuesday: Done Nothing? Ha! Realized at about 11 AM that, in the course of rooting around behind the CPU last night, trying to figure out how I had caused the connection outage, so that I could fix it, I had unplugged the speaker jack.

¶ Hooking up the speaker jack wasn’t enough. Rebooting required. Upon rebooting: no monitor connection!

¶ Tightened monitor plugs. Rebooted. Happiness.

I have omitted the part about updated wi-fi drivers, which really did improve conditions, when, at least, there were conditions (an Internet connection) to improve upon. Also, Kathleen’s browser problem was fixed — for the time being. These good things were not of my doing.

When all of this started, all I wanted to do was to watch Coma (a fave). Long before it was over, I just wanted to be in it. Paging Dr Harris!

Reading Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture, Ellen Ruppel Shell’s autopsy (as if!) of a civilization in which the preferred euphemism for “discount” is “value,” takes me back  to my childhood, to the shame of buying underwear at Korvettes. This game of my mother’s involved a double shame. We didn’t, all too obviously, belong at Korvettes. At the same time, we weren’t where we did belong, which would have been, in those days, Best & Co, and, later, B Altman.

Ms Shell’s book takes me back to a football weekend at Notre Dame. My father must certainly have had legitimate business somewhere that involved flight on a company jet (my father was not an idiot), but in those days a slight diversion to a town not directly on the way back home was not frowned upon, provided that one were discreet (my father was discretion itself). (Plus, he provided the crew with tickets to the game.) Mother and Dad were staying at the Morris Inn, where, making do, my mother glanced an ad in the South Bend Tribune and saw that Kresge was selling cases of Planters Dry-Roasted Peanuts at some fantastic low price — one case per customer. Wow! I was asked to round up a few friends for a trip to the store, which lay to the east of campus. My shame was pretty bottomless, but I did it. Having loaded up Dad’s rented sedan, these forgotten friends and I drove straight to the west side of town, where the discounted cases of dry-roasted peanuts were stowed aboard N227T.

Saving money wasn’t the point. Driving forty miles to save a nickel was the point. “Jewing” a merchant “down” was the point. Shame on top of shame! My mother would use this ghastly phrase to summarize her bargaining technique, and I would remember that she was not really my mother. Paying bottom dollar was her idea of dry-roasted fun. More than once — I can say this proudly — I blurted out, “You’re the Jew!”

You might say that I emerged from childhood traumatized by the idea of “cheap.”

What a lot of eating opportunities presented themselves today, largely because other people hadn’t eaten earlier. I never ate a great deal at any one time, but I seemed always to be at table. When I wasn’t eating, I was working here. I did see a movie — Humpday — but of course I was munching on a bag of popcorn all the way through that intense indie, which more than any other recent film I can think of reminded me of the talkily confrontrational French films that we were expected to admire in the Sixties. I did, honestly, admire Humpday, though.

When I came back uptown after lunch with LXIV, I did a bit of housework and then settled down to work. Work on Friday afternoon means taking all the drafts that I have scribbled during the week and turning them into handsome Portico pages, with correct spelling and navigation. While I was working on the Book Review review, Kathleen called to say that one of her best friends from Smith was in town and wanted her to take somebody’s ticket for Billy Elliot. I was fine with that, and, besides, I had alternative plans of my own. Nom de Plume was in town, and said that she might stop by. Stop by she did. When it turned out that she hadn’t eaten all day, I proposed running across the street to Tokubei, the Japanese pub. Like Kathleen’s brother, Kevin, another aficionado, Nom de Plume loves to order off-menu sushi at Tokubei; she says it’s some of the best that she’s ever eaten. (Perhaps she will post a comment itemizing all of her treats!) It was a great pleasure to talk in person.

Back at the apartment, there was a message from Ms NOLA. Ms NOLA and friend JA had called earlier as well, to invite me see Whatever Works with them. They knew that I’d seen it already, but they knew that I liked it enough to see it a second time. I had to decline, though; I’m saving that second time for Kathleen, and in any case I had my Friday publishing to see to (although that didn’t keep me from taking Nom de Plume to dinner). Ms NOLA and JA agreed to drop in after the movie, which was now.

They weren’t hungry, but they hadn’t eaten since lunch, so I handed Ms NOLA a menu from Wu Liang Ye, the Shanghainese restaurant down the street, and phoned in her selections. (The ribs that I also asked for were not delivered, but I wasn’t charged for them, either.) We enjoyed the food out on the balcony, sitting through one of the summer’s more violent thunderstorms. When the rain let up, my guests said that they had to go. How did it get to be 10:15?

Kathleen just now got home from the theatre, minutes after I finished my Friday jobs. She hasn’t eaten, either. This time, I’ll fix her something myself, in the kitchen.

***

Walking from the Angelika to the Chinatown Brasserie, LXIV and I talked about the friendship between Ben and Andrew, the reunited college chums in Humpday. I remarked, somewhat wistfully but mostly with relief, that I had never had such a “relationship.” LXIV all but sputtered. “What about Fossil?”

Fossil! Ha! I told LXIV, hardly believing that he didn’t already know this, that Fossil and had “hated each other” when we were prep school roommates. “Hatred” is too simple a word. We were more like Taiwan and the PRC, if you can imagine a rough parity between those entities. Officially hostile, we were actually too tired and distracted to remain on a footing of open war. Although neither of us had ever heard the term “passive-aggressive,” we both got very good at driving the other crazy while seeming to mind our own business.

We became friends later, when Blair was behind us. Perhaps “became friends” is an overstatement. At no point was there the backslapping, high-fiving, Sons of the Desert-type bonhomie that gets Ben and Andrew into so much trouble. Our tracks, though close, have remained rigorously parallel, which has made it easier to proffer the occasional friendly wave — as the other chugs in the opposite direction. Something that, on our comfy and now rather tidy little model railroad, happens all the time.

What I was going to write about this evening was Leave Her to Heaven, John Stahl’s 1945 “classic.” My Facebook friend Brooks Peters mentioned it today, saying that his vacation aerie in the Thousand Islands reminded him of Behind the Moon, the rustic Maine camp beloved by brothers Dick and Dan Harland before the poisonous Ellen Berent enters Dick’s life. (Cornel Wilde, Darryl Hickman, and Gene Tierney, respectively). The film, shot in a hyper-super-duper Technicolor so saturated that, by today’s more naturalistic standards, the actors appear to be dying of makeup, is so astonishingly dated that you wait for Sarah Bernhardt, Henry Irving, or perhaps even Louis XIV to show up. Alfred Newman’s music makes you long for the wit and wisdom of All About Eve, which he would score a few years later.  

So I thought I’d watch Leave Her to Heaven, even though I wasn’t really in the mood for one of Darryl Zanuck’s attempts to capture the glories of the great outdoors in a sound stage, while killing his actors with makeup. I got as far as the chilling scene with the doctor at Warm Springs, where Dan is recovering, if that is the word, from polio. “But he’s a cripple,” Ellen blurts out. The doctor is appalled, and hastily accepts Ellen’s assurance that she didn’t mean it. You have to see the movie to know why all of this is so dramatic, but even then it’s not clear whether Ellen is a damaged innocent or an unscrupulous narcissist. On the page, she’s clearly the latter, but the camera prefers her to be a minor force of nature — sweet, but dangerous when crossed. The whole grandeur of Leave Her to Heaven comes from the unresolved tension, if you ask me, between these readings. Speaking of reading, I haven’t read Ben Ames Williams’s novel, but I expect that the movie is faithful to certain big scenes but completely out of tune with the book’s tone. But maybe not. Ben Ames Williams, after all, has not come down to us as a writer to be read.

And then there is Vincent Price.

But it’s late, too late to be clipping stills from the DVD and then writing them up. That will have to wait. For the moment, it’s amusing as well as refreshing to imagine that Brooks Peters is enjoying the crystalline conditions that his photos at Facebook suggest while we suffer the first bad summer day of the year. It is not particularly warm in New York, but the air is close and dead. Even Ms NOLA was praying for rain earlier today.

I am reading two wonderful books, although it’s hard to tell which one of them is the bigger downer, story-wise: Methland, by Nick Reding, and A Meaningful Life, by L J Davis. The latter is, all things considered, amazingly funny — the novel that James Thurber never wrote, and couldn’t have written, for obvious reasons, in 1971. Methland gives rise to feelings of the wildest indignation, but without fixing a target (so far). The descriptions of melting skin and decaying brains that litter Mr Reding’s account of bad times in Iowa do seem, however, to have a lot in common with death by makeup.  

It was a glorious day to be out and about on the Upper East Side. The air was sunny and warm, but very clear; and all the rain that we’ve had so far this summer has laundered the city to pressed-napkin freshness. In colder weather, I’d have walked to the ophthalmologist’s office at 70th and Park. Taking a cab, though, gave me the thrill of turning left onto Park Avenue and — voilà! what a view! The Helmsley Building (is it still called that? It used to be the Grand Central Building, not, obviously, to be confused with the Terminal, but erected as part of the ensemble) is under wraps for some kind of renovation, but the pyramidal copper roof is unobstructed.

From the distance of 86th Street (roughly forty blocks), the Helmsley Building, and the Met Life (né Pan Am) Building behind it seem to stand at the end of a fantastic canyon, and to my eye Mother Nature has nothing remotely as formidable. But don’t listen to me. I’ve seen every famous spot in the United States (or at least that’s what it feels like) except the Grand Canyon, which I’ve avoided because I’m as certain as I can be without actual experience that I would find it wanting.

The canyon effect is the doing of the Met Life building, which is why I’ve always loved it. Fossil Darling hates it for having occluded the “profile” of the Helmsley Building, which, truth be told, I’d find rather dinky, now that I’ve gotten used to the massive building behind it.

The sad truth about Park Avenue is that the majesty of the view cannot be apprehended from the sidewalks. Originally, a path twisted through the median, which was quite a bit wider than it is today. I hope that the old configuration is revived at some point, whether I live to see it or not. It will put the High Line back where it belongs, especially if, as one must imagine, the walkway is wide enough to accommodate pedestrian traffic in both directions. I have not yet been to the new High Line park thingy, and I have no plans to see it anytime soon, but, like the Grand Canyon, it will certainly be found wanting if, as I’ve been informed, everyone must walk in the same direction. What is the point of that? Diane von Furstenberg and Barry Diller could count on being seen by photographers, but I should prefer to see and be seen by other folks like myself. The designers, doubtless single young people without children to show off, have proved themselves to be astonishingly ignorant of the European promenade — or, if not ignorant, then wonderfully perverse.

I had a very jolly time at the ophthalmologist’s — I’m not kidding! — but I’ll save that for some other time. Bref, the waiting room is freshened by the sounds of WQXR, the classical music station that has just been sold by its owner, The New York Times. What, I wonder, will replace it? At the ophthalmologist’s, I mean. I’m plotting.

Because of the warmth (“heat” would be too strong a word; although, when I got home, I was dripping like a squeezing sponge), I took a taxi up to 82nd Street, where I paid a visit to Crawford Doyle. I wanted to order Methland. I asked for it last Friday and was told that I could order it, and that’s what I wanted to do today. But today there was a copy in the shop. I also bought the book about the Romantics and science that is going to appear on the cover of the Book Review this weekend (so I’m told). It was recommended to me by a staff member on Friday, but I got distracted and didn’t pick it up. Later, I felt rather awful, because I make a point of taking up plausible recommendations; I’m the rare person who will actually read the book that you’re crazy about, unless I’ve some reason to think that I’ll hate it, which I sometimes do but usually don’t.

Then I had a nice lunch, at Demarchelier on 86th. I read the posthumous Styron story in The New Yorker. At one point — long before the wrenching end — it had me in tears, and not just because my pupils were still dilated. (I look forward to writing the story up tomorrow.) Before lunch arrived, I read a bit of A Meaningful Life, which had had me laughing at the doctor’s. When I came upon the following line at the restaurant, I had to put the book down, overwhelmed by the fertile thing that can attain no more:

Once every month or so, his wife would smile apologetically and a little defensively, put on her longest skirt, and pack herself over to see her mother in Flatbush like some kind of installment-plan Eurydice.

Jonathan Lethem’s forward to the NYRB reprint of this 1971 novel tells us that L J Davis still lives on Dean Street in Brooklyn. Mr Lethem used to play with Mr Davis’s sons.

Walking up Madison to Feldman’s Housewares, between 92nd and 93rd, I wished that I’d brought along a Nano. Then I more or less stopped thinking; my brain was keeping summer hours. So much so that, at Feldman’s, I wound up with two Yodeling Pickles instead of just one, and I forgot all about the pants hanger that Kathleen asked me to pick up. I thought about taking a third taxi home, but the prospect of squeezing into a back seat and then out again made walking looking easier.

And it was a good thing, that walk, because — my brain’s having rebooted for some reason — I made up my mind about something. As an unusual person, and a very tall one, I have always oscillated between two public modes: simple weirdness and pained self-consciousness. I decided today to jettison the pained self-consciousness. The elegant Latin for “Just Deal” will be most welcome.

Here it is, nearly midnight, but instead of writing my Dear Diary entry, I’m reading an interview with Michael Musto at The New York Review of Ideas. (No, I didn’t know about it either [the NYRI], not until yesterday.) It’s nice to know that Michael Musto is a nice person. Actually, I learned this recently from another interview, with the Times I think but perhaps Vanity Fair, a short piece in which it was established that Mr Musto (a) doesn’t drink alcohol and (b) visits his mother every Saturday. Or was it Sunday? Anyway, he goes out to the boroughs and spends an entire weekend day with his mother. His mother is one lucky woman, let me tell you. I used to see things from what we’ll call the Michael Musto point of view. Now I see them from the Mom point of view.

Meanwhile, did I tell you that I’m dying? Well, I’d be dying if it weren’t for — what is this crap called? — Flourouracil. See? Nobody gets that stuff unless death is around the corner. How do you say it, anyway? At first, it made me think of “toura loura lay,” but now I think it’s “floura you’re a sil[ly],” with “flour” pronounced as in “flourish.” Anyhoo, it’s supposed to kill cancer before it starts — a delicious conundrum, don’t you think? My scalp is basically radioactive with cancers — an abandoned nuclear testing ground, Chernobyl goes to Yorkville — planted by insenstive guardians during my youth, imbeciles who made me stand out in left field for hours at a time, despite the fact that I have never liked being in the sun. Some people find the sun warm and pleasant, but I find it hot and unpleasant. And I always have. Left to my own devices, I would not be in need of You’re A Silly.

I put off the goop for about a month, or perhaps it was more like six weeks. I played dumb and said, “Oh, was I supposed to put this on my head? I thought I was supposed to put it here [indicating clavicle] once you’d told me that the wound had healed.” About thirty years ago, I realized that doctors will not wish you dead if you do not follow their instructions. There is no penalty — coming from the doctor, that is — if you don’t take the pills or refuse to give up French fries (“You’ll live forever if you give up the things that make you want to”). What’s curious is my way of resisting some treatments while accepting others without demur. Nobody likes colonoscopies, for example — but I used to, back in the day when a good doctor would plug you full of Demerol before plying the fiber optics. I was flying so high the first time (and this is not only twenty years ago but over twenty colonoscopies ago) that I practically choked on my tongue in an ultimately successful attempt to resist asking the doctor if he liked what he did. I can’t tell you how funny the question seemed at the time, but then you probably can’t imagine how much less nice than Michael Musto I am. 

In today’s Metropolitan Diary — how long has the Times been running that feature? I can remember that it didn’t exist, but not when — there was a sweet piece about a miraculously retrieved bookmark.

The other day I was cleaning out my bookshelves a bit. I always place unwanted books near the curb but away from the garbage so that people can have an opportunity to take a free book.

My wife finds it difficult to throw things out, so when she came home from work, seeing the books, she brought one back into the house. It was a book from her college days. Inside the book, as a place marker, she discovered an unopened letter from a friend. The postage was an 8-cent airmail stamp. The postmark was from 1966.

I slit open the letter and read it to her. It was fairly ordinary stuff, but the last line read, “Good luck on your upcoming blind date.” That blind date was me, 43 years ago. I guess it worked out; we’ve been married 41 years.

Instead of responding to this story with a warm purr, as I was supposed to do, I was busy writing, in my head, the Diary entry that would have been generated if Mrs Alexander had not gotten home in time to save her book.

The other day, I was delivering a bundle of hand-me-downs to my sister’s apartment in Kip’s Bay. Walking along the street, I spotted a box of books lying by the kerb. My eye was immediately drawn to a paperback copy of Jacques Barzun’s Teacher In America, because my favorite uncle was one of Barzun’s last students and he always spoke so reverently of the Columbia professor. I decided to help myself.

When I got home, I noticed an envelopoe tucked into the book, as a kind of bookmark. There was a postmark, dated 1966 — nine years before I was born! I slipped the letter out of the envelope and read the cheerful note from one female undergraduate to another. The writer, whose name was Michelle, mentioned that her boyfriend had taught himself how to play a new Beatles song on the guitar, and that he had serenaded her with it. Ah, the old days!

I was about to fold the letter back into the envelope when I read the PS. “Good luck on your upcoming blind date.” All at once, I wished that I’d never opened the letter. Whoever put the box of books out on East 22nd Street had had a blind date over forty years ago, but I’d never know how it worked out.

Here is something that you ought to know about New York City: every other regular reader of the Metropolitan Diary had the same idea.