Notwithstanding Kathleen’s convalescence, we had a good weekend, which I rather think we were owed. I had a wonderful sense of being ahead of schedule, whatever that means. What difference does it make whether I finish reading The Economist before 2 PM or before 3 PM? I don’t know why, but it makes a big difference. I’m learning that the passage from 2 until 4 is the tricky part of my day; the morning ends at around 2 (finally!), and the evening begins at 4 (already?). With only two hours of afternoon, it’s no wonder that I get edgy. It would be nicer, though, if I had a clearer idea of this Platonic ideal that my schedule is pinned to — and where it came from.

***

What if I gave away all but three or four cookbooks, and stopped reading Saveur? What if I threw away all the food catalogues? I think I’d be happier — I do! — but I’m not willing to risk having to buy new copies of all those cookbooks. Perhaps I ought to experiment with the catalogues and the magazines, though. Talking with Ms NOLA the other day, I realized (or said out loud for the first time) that I already know everything about cooking that I’m ever going to need or use.

This certainly doesn’t mean that I plan to rely on the same old recipes for the rest of my life. Quite the reverse, in fact — and that’s the point. I have a sound culinary technique, I know the foods and the flavors that I like, and I’m far more likely to turn out a good dish by relying on my own imagination than by following somebody else’s ideas.

This afternoon, for example, I was casting about for a sauce for cold salmon. Kathleen couldn’t eat mayonnaise (just to be safe), and dairy was out as well. But the doctor had excepted yogurt from the dairy ban, and I decided to except avocado from the raw-vegetable ban. I happened to have a tub of plain Greek yogurt in the fridge, and a perfectly ripe avocado in the vegetable basket. I had already run downstairs for a bunch of dill: preparing to poach the slice of Scotch salmon, I’d sniffed the jar of dried dillweed and smelled only dust. And, for that prized frugal touch, I had a quietly aging half-lemon lying on the counter. Into the food processor with all of it!

The result was not perfect. The taste of (one) avocado was muted by the plain yogurt. And a teaspoon of curry would have added significant interest, if (a) Kathleen weren’t convalescing and (b) I’d whipped up the sauce about three hours earlier. To thin the sauce, which was thicker than mayonnaise, I added a few tablespoons of water — which felt very odd but which was just right, as I needed liquidity without (extra) flavor. The sauce, spooned over the chilled salmon, went delightfully with steamed zucchini slices as well. Capellini tossed with parmesan cheese completed the summer-luncheon plate.

I’m sure that the avocado-yogurt-dill-lemon sauce appears in a million cookbooks. It’s even possible that I followed a recipe for it once, long ago. It really doesn’t matter. Originality is not the name of the game.

When I asked Kathleen yesterday what she wanted for dinner, I could see her flesh crawl at the prospect of yet more chicken. But the more robust choices were out. How about veal, she asked. So I toddled down to Agata & Valentina and bought a nice rib chop. This I rubbed with a drop of oil and a tablespoon of crushed sage. Broiled for eight minutes on each side, the chop was done to perfection, retaining the faintest blush of pink at the center. I served it with haricots verts and Yukon fingerlings. The potatoes were steamed, and Kathleen had hers plain, without the butter that I swirled mine in. The beans were snipped, parboiled, and sautéed — in Benecol. The Benecol didn’t fool me into thinking that the beans were buttered, but it came close enough.

***

At Crawford Doyle on Friday afternoon, I remembered that Ms NOLA had strongly recommended reading Peter Cameron’s Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You. She also assured me that I’d “knock it off in a day.” Which indeed I did, even though I didn’t start reading it until late yesterday afternoon. I not only read it, I read most of it aloud to Kathleen, while she knitted receiving-blanket prototypes. I was hugely moved.

Well, as you know, I’m hugely moved all the time — I’m lucky that way. But yesterday’s movement was more of a scraping. The way that I’ve developed of remembering my adolescence was what got scraped away. So much of Mr Cameron’s book reminded me of what my teens were really like — which was somewhat surprising, since the novel’s narrator was born in 1985 or thereabouts, nearly forty years later than I was. You’d think that our experiences of adolescence, given everything that has changed, would be rather different, but no.

James Sveck is a very intelligent graduate of Stuyvesant High, class of ’03. He spends the ensuing summer scheming to avoid going to Brown in the Fall. He thinks that college will be a waste of time, and he is very articulate about why. Reason Number One: he hates people his own age, probably because they are adolescents. This displacement was extraordinarily familiar. Teenagers are supposed to suffer all sorts of existential doubts about themselves, but, like James, what I experienced instead was a conviction about others. Especially other adolescent males.

“What’s so bad about college students?”

“They’ll all be like Huck Dupont.”

“You’ve never met Huck Dupont.”

“I don’t need to meet him. The fact that his name is Huck and he got a full hockey scholarship to the University of Minnesota is enough for me.”

“What’s wrong with hockey?”

“Nothing,” I said, “if you like blood sport. But I don’t think people should get full scholarships to state universities because they’re psychopathic.”

I may have put it better myself at the time, but never mind. Forget Holden Caulfield; I knew how to piss people off big-time. As does James.

There’s one line in the book that screamed RJ! so loud that I felt slightly violated. Having “acted out” — a phrase that sadly didn’t exist in my day — on a school trip, James has been sent to a therapist. After weeks of sessions, the shrink finally confronts James about his meltdown. Typically (I’m speaking from experience), James parries her questions with further questions, as if he were the doctor. But he’s not the doctor. At a crucial point, she gets a rise out of him.

“So you assumed I was arrested?” 

“I suppose I did.”

“Well, I wasn’t arrested. And the so-called trouble with the police wasn’t my fault. It was my parents’. They got the police involved. They filed a missing persons resport. If they hadn’t done that, everything would have been fine. Or less bad.”

“Were you missing?”

I realized she had tricked me into talking about what had happened in Washington, and even though I felt okay about talking about it, I wanted to make it clear I was aware I had been tricked, so I didn’t answer.

I think you could say that I spent my youth — not just my adolescence, but my the years between the time when I was first commanded to play baseball (to which I responded with a passive ressistance that I did not need Gandhi to teach me, perhaps because even in fourth grade I was larger than Gandhi) and the time when I decided to buckle down and study for the law boards —  you could say that I spent my life “making it clear.”

Ms NOLA and I got together again this afternoon. I saw Whatever Works at eleven, at the Angelika — and, once again, there was sound trouble. (At least the sound never cut out entirely silent, as it did for Elegy, in the same auditorium.) But nothing could diminish the splashing summer fun of Patricia Clarkson’s astonishing performance — the most astonishing aspect of which was that an astonishing actress could astonish. (Come to think of it, Ms Clarkson appeared in Elegy as well. Maybe the sound gremlin is her doing.) After the movie, I walked over to Spring Street, between Crosby and Lafayette, to visit a shop that was written up in the Times the other day. What a ha-ha Kathleen had at my expense when I announced that I’d discovered it: she has been going to an uptown branch of Pylones for four years at least (sez she). I bought a bunch of stuff, but this was the pièce de résistance. At least Kathleen was kind enough to pronounce it cool.

Then I hopped on the train and rode up to 28th Street. Ms NOLA and I had a lunch date at La Petite Auberge, an ancient-looking French restaurant on Lex with an ancient-looking menu. There is nothing ancient-tasting about the food, however. Although it’s conservative, it is not preserved.

There was much to discuss. It was all utterly confidential and très hush-hush. Ms NOLA actually surveyed the restaurant at one point, to make sure that we were “alone.” By the time we left, there was no need to survey the restaurant, because everyone else had left.

After a little errand at a nearby print shop, we headed up to Yorkville and the Upper East Side, where we eventually found ourselves at the Museum’s Roof Garden. This year’s artist, Roxy Paine, has “planted” the terrace with what looks like a wildly out-of-control potato vine and an ice-bedecked bramble.

It was glorious, up on the roof. There was a fine breeze that moderated the beat of the sun. I had a couple of glasses of Prosecco. Ms NOLA soaked up the greenery of the clipped yews that border the garden (not to mention the grand carpet of treetops that separated us from Midtown). Life was good.

We went downstairs and sailed quickly through the Francis Bacon show.  I make a point of visiting the big painting or drawing shows whenever I’m at the Museum, even if it’s only for a few minutes’ visit. That is the luxury of living nearby: there is always time for a quick run-through — and for a few stop-and-stares along the way. I have begun to recognize the face of George Dyer even after his lover has rearranged it.

Stopping in at Crawford Doyle minutes before it closed, and loading up on great books that I may not live to read, we returned to the apartment and drank tea on the balcony. Eventually, we persuaded Kathleen to come home. Actually, she met us at the New Panorama Café, where she dared to dine on her usual dish, penne al pomodoro. A consultation with the internist lifted the prisoner-of-war diet. Kathleen is to avoid whole milk, butter, and cream for a week, but she can eat hard cheese, which of course  mean reggiano parmegiano. Last time I checked, she was sleeping comfortably. Ms NOLA hopped on a bus afterward, and I have been here at my desk ever since. It hardly feels like three hours!

Today was gloriously “meta.” Astonishingly!

Don’t you hate that word? “Meta” always sounds to me like one of those awful Midwestern women’s names from the last century. And did you know that all it means — “meta” — is “after” or “between”? All right, it’s more complicated than that; as a preposition, μετά means different things depending upon the case of the associated noun. But the one thing that μετά does not mean is “meta.” Here’s why:

They were arranging Aristotle’s books on a shelf one day. So to speak. Aristotle’s “books” were in most cases passels of notes taken by students and recensed after the philosopher’s demise. The book that begins, “All men by nature desire to know” somehow wound up shelved after the book that begins,

When the objects of an inquiry, in any department, have principles, causes, or elements, it is through acquaintance with these that knowledge and understanding is attained. Are we dead yet?

This second/first book was called, for very clear reasons — it’s about the world that we perceive — Physics. The next book on the shelf, which is about some other world, some world that we can’t see, and that, therefore, in the eyes of many ancient Greeks and even more modern Americans, is better than the world described in Physics, came to be called Metaphysics — the book after Physics.

However: here’s why the day was “meta”: I was busy all day reading and writing stuff for The Daily Blague and Portico. That was it. The things that did not pertain to Internet sites belonged under the category of breathing: I made the bed. I ate lunch. I collected the mail and went to Food Emporium. I made shrimp risotto for one (Kathleen is still on her prisoner-of-war diet). I still have to wash half of the dishes. Fascinating stuff.

When I wasn’t being domestically fascinating, I was thinking thoughts that have already been copyrighted by other pages. If I were to write about them here, it would be the world’s most ludicrous episode of “Behind the Scenes!” Which, come to think of it, isn’t so far from “Between the Scenes!”

After dinner, we watched Gambit, a favorite movie that never ceases to surprise us — the surprise being that Ronald Neame’s 1966 caper flick isn’t celebrated as a great Hollywood entertainment. Maybe the film is too good. For the first twenty minutes, we’re treated to the “perfectly planned” scenario that will bring Harry Dean (Michael Caine) into larcenous proximity with a fabulously valuable portrait bust; Nicole  Chang (Shirley MacLaine), an attractive Hong Kong taxi dancer, will run interference for him by mesmerizing the wealthiest man in the world (and the owner of the portrait bust), Ahmad Shahbandar (Herbert Lom), with recollections of his late wife. What you might miss the first time through is that, in the enactment of the plan, Nicole never utters a word. She is the perfect woman: mysterious and silent. By “too good,” I mean that things go hilariously downhill from there.

In fact, Nicole is something of a chatterbox. The movie ads teased viewers by giving them permission to tell their friends how the movie ends, as long as they didn’t tell how it begins. Because the beginning is a fantasy, a male pipe-dream in which careful forethought is mistaken for a guarantee of success. Harry Dean’s plan is a beaut. But it is just a plan, and it assumes that Harry knows all there is to know about his mark. In the end, of course, Harry is utterly dependent on Nicole’s ability to improvise escapes from potentially mortifying hot spots.

One of the film’s little jokes is that Harry Dean, a compleat Cockney (“What’s the matter wi’ you?”), pretends to be Sir Harold Dean, old Etonian (Thank you”). Harry thinks that he has done his homework, but he can’t tell Shahbandar the name of the headmaster back in the day. He hasn’t even taken the trouble to impersonate a baronet his own age. As Nicole discovers to her chagrin, Harry has concocted his plan in the friction-free laboratory of his own conceit.

***

In the Book Review this week, Dominique Browning reviews Frances Osborne’s book about her great-grandmother, The Bolter. In the review, Ms Browning refers to An Aesthete’s Lament, one of my blidgeted blogs and, indeed, the source of my awareness of the book, which, at the time, was not available here in the United States. So I did what Idina Sackville (the Bolter) would have done and ordered a copy from Amazon in England (“Amazuke.”) I’m not saying that Idina Sackville would have gone to any trouble about ordering a book — she doesn’t appear to have been much of a reader — but she tended to traverse with dispatch the shortest distance between herself and what she wanted.

Sadly, though, The Bolter has not turned out to be a book that I want to read. Much of the book is good enough or better, but much of it is quite regrettable, at least by my lights. Here is Paris, shortly after the beginning of the Great War:

Paris was a city of façades: brushed pavements, manicured parklets, rows of little shop fronts and grand colonnades. Its web of cobbled alleyways, passages and petites rues led from the damp, sweet air of bakeries to the rich aromas of cafés before tumbling out into long, wide boulevards. Here proud, pale-stoned bâtiments descended in classical lines to the ground, where suddenly the archways and wrought iron gates broke into curls and twisted vines — pure, shivering, Parisian elegance.

These comely and inviting phrases describe Paris to a T, as indeed I can attest from my last visit, in 2003. Ms Osborne’s flourish captures what we might call the Eternal Paris, but it lacks the frank decency to begin, “Paris, then as now…” The sheer padding-ness of her sweet little paragraph is so egregious that it’s funny. But The Bolter is not a funny book.

And, let’s face it: “Paris was a city of façades” is a statement that deserves to be chiseled on a marble slab at the Prep School Hall of Bull Shit Fame. The author sometimes appears determined to be as verbally depraved as her thrice-plus-twice divorced great-grandmother was sexually. Indeed, it was doubtful that I’d finish The Bolter, until Ms Browning’s reference to An Aesthete’s Lament. That pricked my sense of responsibility. One of the Aesthete’s readers would have to file a book report; it might as well be me. Which is abominable conceit for you, as Ms Browning, also quite clearly a reader, has not only done the job but been paid for it.

***

It’s not that I’m a pessimist, really, but I don’t go in for the kind of daydream that, in Gambit, leads Harry Dean down the garden path. Instead of foreseeing that a plan will proceed like clockwork, I anticipate elaborately contingent disasters. My attempt to withdraw money from a local ATM, for example, will be thwarted by an out-of -control, Taking of Pelham-type “police activity” in the subway station below the bank. The Harry Deans of the world would take up dishwashing if they had to run their schemes by me for approval.

That’s why, once the initial surprise mellowed into ongoing delight, I decided not to mention my grandchild’s existence until his or her graduation from high school. I was tempted, just now, to specify a college graduation, but that prediction seemed uncomfortably fraught. Perhaps college will be completely passé in 2031 — and how likely is it that I’ll be compos mentis at the age of 83? As it is, the child’s more immediate hurdle is birth itself, an event that will roughly coincide with my turning 62. Which I don’t dare to look forward to!

Kathleen, however, is knitting.

 

The quiet life that I have taken up this summer — I’m “away,” even though I haven’t gone anywhere — has created a vacuum of sorts, and my mind is filling it up with all sorts of miscellaneous reflections. Some of the things that pop into my head are “live” issues that I’m “thinking” about, with a captial “T.” Others are scraps of memory — but they’re not what you’d call “memories.” They’re the ashes, or ghosts, or whatever, of old longings. I used to abound in longings. Now I have only one longing, and that is to live until tomorrow. I wouldn’t trade it for the world.

Among the capital-T thoughts: Freud. For some time now, Freud has been regarded, by intelligent people, not as the radical sexologist who assured us that we all harbored unspeakable thoughts about our parents, but as a humanist who made it possible to talk about — sex. Look back at “the literature” (any literature!) before Freud, and you will find that sexuality pretty much equals bestiality, something that human beings, half-beast but also half-angel, ought to rise above. You will find that no responsible person prior to Freud had anything systematically positive to say about sex. (By “systematically positive,” I mean to exclude the occasional enthusiastic insight penned on a Greek-island junket.) Freud humanized sex — and the proof of his achievement is in the odd sound of that statement. How could sex be in need of humanizing? Trust me: it needed it, especially after Augustine was through with it.

Freud’s contribution, then, was to make talk about sex decent. It’s a staggering achievement. In a few short treatises on dreams and slips of the tongue and whatnot, Freud demolished three thousand years of patriarchal nonsense about carnality.

Almost everything that Freud had to say about sex, though, was wrong, at least as regards specifics. How many boys experience “the Oedipus complex”? I daresay that the lusts of small boys have no respectable Greek-myth correlative, and would look, if realized, a lot like Animal House.

Everybody knows that Freud is wrong about the particulars. But one problem remains. If, prior to Freud, only pathological misfits were obsessed by sex, after Freud, everybody was obsessed by sex. (As you can imagine, this universalization was vital, if Freud’s theories were to be decent.) But, just as only a handful of human beings prior to Freud were, fact, truly bestial, so, after Freud, only a handful of human beings were what Freud would have called “genital.” The rest of us having been spending fortunes on spas and vitamin supplements in hopes of becoming as fully sexualized as we “ought to be.”

Especially those of us who are not twenty years old.

What’s great about sex, when you get right down to it, is the very material evidence that you’re wanted, however briefly. Not only wanted, but permitted to want right back. Orgasm is nature’s way of putting this neediness away, at least for a while, while at the same time gratifying it.

So much for Thoughts. (I could have gone on about Freud all night!) As for Memory, I’m remembering the keen desire to Go Out.

The desire to Go Out, suffered to unspeakable degrees by almost everyone between the ages of 21 and 35, is strangely assymetrical. There is no corresponding desire to Go Home. If you actually want to go home, you are probably about to be arrested. You would rather go home than be detained by the police, which is almost certainly what you deserve — if you have reached the phase of wanting, truly, to Go Home.

Now that I no longer desire to Go Out (not at all), I’m surprised by the power of the view from the balcony (portion shown above) to remind me of the feeling without actually rekindling it. Why should the sight of a thousand windows, some of them lighted, slightly more of them not — and all of them signals of housebound domesticity — arouse a desire to freshen up, don an outfit, and venture forth in the cool summer evening?

Freud would have said it was sex. If only!

 

How to get to New Hampshire, that is the question.

Aside from the usual New England prettiness, New Hampshire has nothing to recommend it, and ought probably to be expelled from our enlightened republic. Most of the inhabitants would never notice.

There’s this one thing, though: my aunt and most of my cousins live there. They’re no more New Hampshire natives than I’m a Texan. We were all living happily in Westchester until a couple of late-Sixties catastrophes propelled my father and his brother in different professional directions. Even then, New York was more easily reached from Houston than it was from Hillsborough County.

A visit from me is somewhat overdue, and yet I find myself asking why I, who live in the center of the universe, am not welcoming my aunt and my cousins on visits to New York City. I suspect that the answer goes something like this. The move to the Monadnocks was so traumatic that the appeal of Gotham must evermore be denied. So much so that, until his death a few years ago, my uncle used to take my aunt on annual visits to London (Angleterre) to see the latest shows. There was a certain Bronx-cheering ostentation in this gesture that I never called. I guess I’m doing so now.

I used to visit my relations in Wilton, Lyndeborough Center, and Peterborough so often that they were afraid, as the bumper sticker has it, that I’d take over. But there came a point after which I could no longer drive responsibly. My rigid neck made unsignaled intersections difficult and dangerous to cross. (Wah Wah! Don’t Cry For Me, AAA!)

The very idea of Kathleen’s driving requires a separate entry, but as everyone who knows her knows, it is an absolute impossibility. In any case, she talks of flying to Manchester and hiring a car and driver for the weekend. This rather chichi option has its appeal, and no doubt I’d like to tour the North of Italy in such a conveyance. But I have no intention of pulling up at my aunt’s kerb in a limousine. The simple truth is that I’m unwilling to go anywhere in this sad strange country that I live in that doesn’t doesn’t give me NRA-level freedom of transportation. If I can’t walk out into the street, raise my hand, and stop a taxi, then I don’t want to go there.

As for people don’t want to come to New York City, then they’re not telling the truth when they claim to want to see me. He who is tired of Gotham is tired of RJK. C’est ça.  

 

This morning, implementing a diabolical plot, I poisoned Kathleen, subjecting her to a life of torment.

I confess!

The plot was diabolical because it was impatient. Kathleen’s tummy bug has been with us for several weeks now, and it has not responded to my stream of eviction notices. This morning, I persuaded Kathleen that she had recovered enough to have an almost-normal weekend breakfast. But the croissant and the scrambled eggs, while perhaps not deadly on their own, were catalyzed by coffee and fresh-squeezed orange juice into a toxic fireball that kept Kathleen in bed all day — because the bed is to stay close to the bathrrom.

The glorious weather outside was simply an insult.

Kathleen sweetly begged me not to feel bad, but it was impossible. If I had deliberately slipped her a poison pill, my remorse could not have been greater. What ought to have been a pleasant day on the balcony, knitting and checking out eBay was instead a tableau vivant from the last days of a beloved cholera victim. It was some comfort that Kathleen didn’t run a fever at all; it seemed simply to be a matter of her body saying NO! A THOUSOUND TIMES, NO! to fresh-squeezed orange juice. And not kidding about the thousand times, either.

At five o’clock on Sundays, Kathleen calls her parents. I offered to call on her behalf, and the offer was accepted. I told Kathleen’s father what I’d done. He laughed. I resolved not to mention this unbelievable callousness to Kathleen, but when I recounted the verbal portion of our conversation, she smiled (wanly!) and said, “Daddy probably laughed.” The joke was that I’m as impatient as my father-in-law for rude good health to grace his partner. And indeed I am, only I haven’t his excuse. For in truth I’m the sick person in this household. The one who, before Remicade, used to spend days and weeks as Kathleen spent this afternoon.

In all seriousness, I was very angry with myself. Kathleen kept saying, “But I decided that I could handle the orange juice. You didn’t force-feed me!” Sweetest Kathleen! What Kathleen actually decided, though, was that it was easier to drink the orange juice than to bear the atmospheric pressure of my pouts and whistles.

They talk about people who are “bad patients,” who can’t let others nurse them through, say, a tummy bug. But I am a “bad nurse.” Get well soon, or it’s “bring out your dead.”

Or, from Kathleen’s viewpoint, it’s as Winston Churchill immortally put it: “If I were your husband, madam, I would drink that orange juice!”  

Clippings virumque cano.

What I want to know — but without lifting a finger to find out — is why I was so fascinated, way back in the Spring of 2001, with New Jersey’s Miranda Imbroglio. No, you’re right — I wouldn’t know what I was talking about, either, if I hadn’t unearthed a shoal of clippings about the matter this afternoon.

Let me take you back: Christie Whitman, then the Republican governor, resigned to take a cabinet position in the new Bush Administration (she wouldn’t last). This made Donald DiFrancesco, the President of the New Jersey State Senate, Acting Governor. The state constitution required that he remain president of the Senate. This meant that the powerful Mr DiFrancesco had a lot of enemies.

I can’t remember why Mr DiFrancesco wanted to appoint Isabel Miranda, a former Citibank executive, to serve as state treasurer. And I’m not going to try to find out now! David Halbfinger’s story in the Times (3-26-01) will have to do:

Isabel Miranda, who was named treasurer of New Jersey on March 19 and took over as acting treasurer on Friday, was director of trusts and estates for Citibank’s private banking unit until 1996, when, the co-workers say, she was forced to resign and immediately escorted from her office in the Citicorp tower in Midtown Manhattan.

The co-workers said Ms. Miranda was fired after auditors found evidence that she and Donald R. Browne Jr., an executive in Citibank’s San Francisco office who later transferred to New York, had charged the bank for frequent cross-country trips to visit each other and for trips together to places like Palm Beach, Fla.

There must have been a cherchez-la-femme aspect to this story that I found pungent at the time. But Ms Miranda’s misadventures have been buried by thick sediments of 9/11, James McGreevy, and Albany follies from Spitzer to Espada. (Here in the Tri-State area, we can deal with only one dysfunctional statehouse at a time.) The lights went out on this story in my brain a long time ago. I could remember, handling the clippings, that I’d been fascinated by it, but I hadn’t a clue as to why. Even now that I’ve glanced over Mr Halbfinger’s three-page story, I haven’t a clue as to why.

***

I still don’t know when exactly it was that I launched Portico, but I believe that it was during Y2K. So, when the DiFrancesco/Miranda story was in the news, my familiarity with Web publishing was still rudimentary. I mention this because I don’t think that it had occurred to me yet that a political story transpiring in New Jersey was something that I might ever write about. I was clipping the Times’s stories about it simply because they interested me, and I thought that, at some critical point in the future, it would be fun to haul out the old news and point to the details that, now, in this hypothetical future, would shimmer with iridescent significance. That critical moment never came. Other critical points supervened.

***

Getting rid of clippings has been on the agenda for a while now.  The deliberations have been complicated — if you don’t believe me, just remember “Times Select” — but the salient point here is that I don’t need the reminders that newspaper clippings can provide. I know this because they never provided me with any reminders, and that for the simple reason that I never consulted them. Once tucked away in their folders, the clippings entered the state of suspended existence experienced by all those knick-knacks on the Titanic. Unlike said knick-knacks, the clippings lacked any and all intrinsic interest.

There was one extrinsic interest that they might have developed, however, and this dire possibility made it imperative to get rid of the things. I’ve neglected to mention until right now that the two well-stuffed accordion folders that I finished purging this afternoon contained clippings from the Summer of 2o00 to the Summer of — 2002. I was certainly at the height of my newspaper-clipping powers back in those critical years!  But just think: what if I became famous (posthumously, of course), and scholars discovered those accordion files? You know what scholars are! The Clippings of RJ Keefe: 2000-2002. Once they’d dealt with my choice of 9/11/Terrorism articles, and my phonebook-thick sheaf of plush about The Producers (all tossed today, except for the one with the Hirschfeld drawing. Hirschfeld!), they’d speculate about my “unaccountable interest in New Jersey politics.” Couldn’t have that!

***

I did find one clipping that shimmered with iridescent significance. It was so shimmeringly significant that I almost broke down in tears. Among the many Paul Krugman columns that I cut out of the Times before finally realizing that (a) I agreed with Mr Krugman on all points and (b) it would more convenient to collect his thoughts in book form, even though (c) this turned out to be unnecessary, given the whizbang Times site, which nobody could have imagined back then, was the following, “Passing The Buck” (3 September 2002).

In his keynote speech at last week’s Jackson Hole conference, Mr. Greenspan offered two excuses. First, he claimed that it wasn’t absolutely clear, even during the manic market run-up of 1999, that something was amiss: “it was very difficult to definitively identify a bubble until after the fact — that is, when its bursting confirmed its existence.” Second, he claimed that the Fed couldn’t have done anything anyway. “Is there some policy that can at least limit the size of a bubble and, hence, its destructive fallout? . . . the answer appears to be no.”

I wasn’t alone in finding this speech disturbingly evasive. As The Financial Times noted, policy makers always have to act on limited information: “The burden of proof for a central bank should not be absolute certainty.” The editorial also reminded readers that while Mr. Greenspan may now portray himself as skeptical but powerless during the bubble years, at the time many saw him as a cheerleader. “The Fed chairman . . . may well have contributed to the explosion of exuberance in the late 1990’s with his increasingly bullish observations.”

Moreover, there is evidence that Mr. Greenspan actually knew better. In September 1996, at a meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee, he told his colleagues, “I recognize that there is a stock market bubble problem at this point.” And he had a solution: “We do have the possibility of . . . increasing margin requirements. I guarantee that if you want to get rid of the bubble, whatever it is, that will do it.”

Yet he never did increase margin requirements, that is, require investors to put up more cash when buying stocks.

You’ll note that Mr Krugman (and, presumably, the Financial Times) uses the C word: cheerleader. If only Alan Greenspan’s tenure at the Federal Reserve could be as murkily lost to the mists of time as the machinations of Donald DiFrancesco, what a much happier world this would be! I have no doubt of it. I had no doubt of it when I clipped Mr Krugman’s column.

Today was the day that the New York Times wasn’t delivered — anywhere. I exaggerate, certainly. But, still…

I thought it was just me, of course, when Kathleen reported the missingness of the Times at the door this morning. (The relevant credit card expired a few months ago, and I never bothered to provide a new expiration date; then again, I was never asked to do so.) When I called the newspaper’s 800 number, however, I was immediately informed of a “production delay.” I was also assured that the paper would be delivered by noon. That did not happen.

I thought it was just me “of course” because  I really did let my subscription to The New Yorker lapse. Now, how did that happen? I don’t remember throwing away any of the hundreds of the reminders notices that invariably precede such dire cut-offs. I used to be terribly about that sort of thing, but now that I am an old dodderer with nothing better to do, I open “renewal notices” right away. I can’t think what happened with the only really important magazine in the world that I take.

That’s pretty much it for today. The newspaper didn’t come. I had bought this week’s issue of The New Yorker at the newsstand across the street on Monday. I didn’t miss the Times, really. I read online most of what I would have read shuffling through the broadsheet; what I missed was the Opinion, which I never look at online unless I’m linking to something. It was not the end of the world, not getting the paper. I guess that that’s how the world ends; but then I don’t want to sound like a toad in warm water.

Oh, I did ask for some help with Corel’s WinDVD software. I had never figured out how to capture images with the latest version of the program. It turned out to be simpler than I dreamed. So often, that’s the problem.

The thing is, I’m married to Sheherazade. Only, my wife has updated the job description to suit herself. I’m the one who does the talking. This is not something that I am unwilling to do, as you may have inferred from hints here and there. But she gets to listen.

Decapitation is not a risk, but when Kathleen has had enough, she excuses herself from the table. This doesn’t mean that I’ve begun to bore her; it just means that she has had enough. She asks questions. Sometimes I don’t know the answers — that’s why netbooks were invented. Sometimes her question opens a floodgate of talk. The subject is almost always history of some kind: what happened to other people some time ago. Kathleen hated history in school, and insists that she learned nothing. She also — how Sheherazade is this — insists that, if I had been her teacher, she would have loved history. I make the people so real, she says. It is true that a number of the prominent figures — disproportionately kings, cardinals, and trouble-making aristocrats — are almost as familiar to me as people whom I “actually know.” They are certainly more familiar to me than they are to a rather small number of lives in being. Every time I talk about them to Kathleen, I get to know them a little better, and not just because I’m making stuff up as I go along.

Kathleen’s conversational manner at the dinner table, then, is quite colossally flattering to me. To say that I am quite aware of this is not to deny that I am, effectively, as flattered as buttered toast.

If Kathleen does not find my disquisitions on inquisitions difficult to follow, that is because she spends her days running inquisitions of her own, into faulty and misleading legal instruments. Years of explaining and anticipating the actions of the Securities and Exchange Commission have made her rather like the ambassadors whom Venice planted at all the major Renaissance courts, suave analysts of the bottom line who knew how to ask serious questions without seeming to be rude. I make it sound glamorous, but Kathleen’s dealings do not take place in Palladian arcades. They wearyingly transpire, for the most part, on telephones and computer screens. After a day of that, it seems, it’s a pleasure to come home and listen to me chatter about Venetian diplomats at Renaissance courts. She feels the kinship to those long-dead diplomats, but she doesn’t have to know the people. Knowing about them is entertaining.

Considering the documents that Kathleen edits by the hour, my complicated sentences, in spite of being saturated with dependent clauses and parenthetical asides, are so much syntactical finger-painting. As I say, my idea of history is a matter of personalities. It is always and only about distinct individuals, so that, instead of forces and trends, there are fashions and anxieties. Despite the complexity — the occasional hypertrophism — of my verbiage, it is usually not abstract, but rather about a specific somebody who was once worried sick about making the right impression (or who ought to have been). They are just like Kathleen’s clients, except that, wonderfully, they are not her clients.

I sometimes have reason to suspect that my wife’s interest in what I have to say has rendered me unfit for general conversation. And there is something else that you ought to know about Kathleen.

She loves to hear me whistle along with Mozart, Verdi, et al. No, I didn’t believe it, either. But it’s true.

In the kitchen, I’ve been watching Woody Allen’s Manhattan. What this means is that the little TV/DVD player in the kitchen gets paused a lot, while I go off to do something else — sometimes for hours. (I turn the machine off overnight, and it picks right up when I turn it back on.) It’s a very personal way of watching movies, and, to tell the truth, “watching” doesn’t come into it much. It would be better to say that I listen. With vintage Woody Allen, needless to say, this works very well; the jokes don’t seem as appliquéd to the cinematic texture — which, in Manhattan, is extraordinary.

Manhattan is one of the three pivotal movies that Mr Allen made in the late Seventies; Interiors and Stardust Memories are the others. All three are unrestrained imitations of movies by Fellini and Bergman. Not imitations of particular movies, and not imitations in the cheesy “bad” sense, but imitations in the old classic sense, as in “Imitation of Horace” (a poem in the style of Quintus Horatius Flaccus). Visually, they are all extremely successful; dramatically, the tension between the intense look and feel that Mr Allen adopted from the Europeans and the cheeky dialogue of the two black-and-white films is difficult for some Allen fans, while the way too serious, out-Bergmaning Bergman tone of Interiors dares viewers to be bored. Neither Manhattan nor Stardust Memories, however, is an overlooked stepchild.

The grandeur of Manhattan owes a great deal to a third partner: in addition to the great screenplay (written with Marshall Brickman) and Gordon Willis’s gorgeous cinematography, the music is by George Gershwin, and I wish I could say who orchestrated it. (The selections all seem to come from the overtures to Gershwin’s Broadway shows.) What Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff did for an idea of old Russia, Gershwin does for the New York City that still existed in 1979. Mr Allen’s virtuoso use of some of Gershwin’s most romantic tunes, especially as hymns to the sweetness of the young Mariel Hemingway, is just about operatic.

But even though nothing visual about the film is particularly jarring to anyone familiar with today’s city — the cars look a bit out-of-date, but then cars always do — the feeling of everything is somehow different. The Manhattan of Manhattan is a more innocent, more integrated, and strangely less self-conscious place. Manhattan was the first movie to make the visual proposition that New York City is the sophisticated equal of London, Paris, Rome, and the other great capitals that Americans are too provincial to know about. It was a new idea in 1979, and very exciting. Woody Allen made a persuasive case. Nowadays, though, it’s hard to believe that the argument ever needed to be advanced.

Kathleen and I saw Manhattan when it came out — in South Bend, Indiana, where we were finishing up law school. The following year, Kathleen would take a studio apartment in the building that we live in to this day. The fact that we have stayed put has only made the city’s changes more obvious. To mention just one dossier: when we arrived, Eighty-Sixth Street was still the main street of the old Germantown, lined with restaurants such as the Ideal and the Kleine Konditorei. The Old Dutch delicatessen had a sign in the window: “this is NOT a kosher delicatessen.” (Or words to that effect.) For a long time afterward, the space was occupied by a kosher delicatessen. Now, it’s a bakery.

The interesting structure that the German department store, Bremen House, built for itself in the Eighties is now a Pizzeria Uno. (Some of us remember the day that Bremen House didn’t open. It never really closed.) Next door, the tenants at the Ventura apartments must be very unhappy, because all of the building’s vast retail space is vacant. Circuit City was in the basement, and Barnes & Noble has consolidated at a new location nearer to Lexington Avenue. That’s a lot of dried-up revenue stream! Such worries were unknown in 1980.

Come to think of it, thirty years is the life span of most traditional mortgages: a long time in anybody’s book. If I had watched a thirty year-old movie when my daughter was born, it might well have been The Palm Beach Story. Yikes! I wasn’t thirty years old at the time, and PBS might as well have been scripted by Aristophanes as by Preston Sturges — if I’d known about it, which I didn’t. (As it happened, though, I was mad about some movies that were pushing forty, all starring Fred Astaire.) Manhattan, at whatever age, will retain the poignance of having captured New York as it was when I came back to the town I was born in.

I’ll close on a dark note. I’m not entirely sure, but I believe that, in the montage that introduces Manhattan, not one of the loving scenes of the city shows the World Trade Center. I am almost certain that the WTC does not appear in the movie at all. That is very much how we felt about those towers, not just in 1979, but, even more strongly, when they were built. I wonder if, thirty years from now, anyone will remember how deeply New Yorkers felt that a pair of unimaginative spindles had let them all down. Not to mention how we felt, very quietly, later on.

When I first saw the supermarket tabloid headlines about Farrah Fawcett, I thought, but for only a nanosecond, that it was a terrible joke. Then I remembered that this was how Lee Remick died, plus many since. And that is the tragedy.

My principal recollection of Farrah Fawcett is Spalding Gray’s mention of auditioning with her, in Terrors of Pleasure. Check it out; if nothing else, it will suggest why, if you are reading this, you have no future in front of a camera.

As far as Charlie’s Angels goes, I didn’t watch the show very often — I was already well into my TV withdrawal — but, when I did, I was a staunch Kate Jackson fan. I like smart women who keep their clothes on in public. I also like smart men who keep their clothes on in public. There are statues for that! And private rooms for the lucky few.

I once had an argument with a friend that took the strangest turn. He was rather ecstatically remembering the ecstasies of a particularly well-appointed pole-dancing bar in Atlanta. I didn’t get it: I don’t want to look at anything that I can’t touch. This is, it seems, a minority view. Lots of people really do like window shopping. Pas moi. When confronted by attractive but seriously underdressed young people, I’m distressed on behalf of their parents. “I guess it was easier for her to change her name than for her whole family to change theirs.”

Anyway, and I don’t mean this uncharitably, the word “airhead” has always conjured that famous picture of Farrah Fawcett. This isn’t because I ever thought that the actress was dimwitted, but rather because it had to be air up there; anyone with that much hair wouldn’t have been able to hold her head up.

Speaking of smart women, Jenny Diski’s piece about Nina Simone in the current LRB is Ms Diski at her best. It’s amply about the great singer of “My Baby Just Cares For Me,” but it’s also about Jenny Diski — in the way that the recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking are all about French Cooking — but also about Julia Child. I must confess to some dismaying S & M fantasies involving Jenny Diski. Smart and fully clothed, she berates me from high table. “Bourgeois swine!” That sort of thing — and richly deserved. But then comes the part that sends me over the moon. “Now, go make me an omelette.” Yes, ma’am! The first thing I do when a new issue of the London Review of Books arrives is to check the table of contents for my favorite byline.

Then I make an omelette. Just in case. If anything happens to Jenny Diski, you can count on some shameless caterwauling from me.

How can I claim to have had a productive day when I didn’t get anything done — anything beyond le minimum,  that is.

***

Speaking French, let’s not forget to mention the six photographs that Jean Ruaud put up at Mnémoglyphes today. I know, I know — you get it: we think that Jean is one of the best photographers who ever snapped a shutter. But this is not about Jean. This is about six beautiful images. Three pairs, really: two transcendental clichés, touristic images that, for a change, succeed at being interesting as well as beautiful — but very beautiful. Then, two shop windows, one with a peacock (or lyre bird? guinea hen?), and one with a rag doll or two — and both of them loaded with reflections and other “irrelevant” information. (I wonder who’s having the sale across the street from the bird.)

Finally, two quiet street scenes with patches of sun — and (oh! ) the surprising shadow of a lanterne. Perhaps it is simply age on my part, but I do not envy Jean’s ability; I do not wish that I might have taken these pictures. It’s quite enough that they were taken, never mind by whom. That they were taken by a good friend is, I insist, incidental. Although it is true that, as he has been a good friend for a few years, I have the habit of giving his photographs my complete attention. And how rewarded am I now!

***

For dinner, Kathleen was ready to try chicken soup again. I took a box of College Inn that I keep in the fridge and poured it all into a saucepan — uneconomical, I know, but I happened not to have any cans on hand. Then I cut off a slice of mirepoix and tossed it in with the broth. This I warmed over the lowest heat possible, for hours. When Kathleen announced that she was coming home, I brought another saucepan of water to the boil and cooked a third of a cup of orzo, Kathleen’s favorite pasta. I served the homely results on Royal Worcester that we bought before we were married, along with a glass of water and a stainless ice-cream compote of lime Jell-O.

Never mind what I had. It was good, but I’m working on it.

***

In the afternoon, I finished Alex Ross’s piece in The New Yorker about Marlboro Music. I began it last night but had to put it down. It was late, but Mr Ross’s deferential treatment of Mitsuko Uchida, one of the co-directors of Marlboro and a very great pianist — and very grand — was waking me up. The sheer niceness of the coverage was putting me in mind of  Club Sonata.  (Think Mickey Mouse and Annette Funicello.)

Wolferl: Gee, Aunt Mitzi, what are we going to do today?

Aunt Mitzi: Well, kiddos, I thought we would explore the Werktreue of “Body and Soul.” Who wants treble?

Franzl: Me! Me!

It was all too wholesome. The redemptive powers of music &c — only, in this case, there didn’t seem to be much need for redemption. If it hadn’t been for David Soyer’s “Property of David Soyer” obsession, Marlboro would have come off as stunningly free of original sin.  

Verily, it is a sublime misfortune, cosmic timing-wise, that Ms Uchida will probably not figure in the gallery of Meryl Streep’s uncanny impersonations.

***

In the evening, there was a reception at the Museum for contributors of our level and up. The nibbles must have been succulent. Bad weather, however, suggested that the Roof Garden was not going to be the most pleasant venue in the city, if indeed it was opened at all. Ms NOLA had a prior engagement, and Nom de Plume was recovering from a chest cold. Kathleen gallantly offered to go, to keep me company, but I didn’t want to go quite that badly myself. So I stayed at home. At six, I chuckled with sagacity: the very air was sodden with misery. But when I looked up from my work at a quarter to eight, things had changed. The air was clear, and the temperature had dropped. When did this happen? Very possibly, too late for the Museum staff to shift gears. But I was sorry, for a full five minutes, that I hadn’t had the fortitude to go by myself.

If I were a normal person, I could count on meeting friends at a place that I regularly frequent, such as the Museum’s previews. In fact, it might have happend; but I couldn’t expect it. There is something about the art of acquaintance that is hidden from me: I don’t know what it is that I don’t have.

***

I did keep my desk tidy, all day. Desks, really — all three of them. If I didn’t get anything done, it’s because I was busy putting everything away.

Message from the sysop:

The wireless drivers may need a update but im not sure that will fix the weird problems.

To which I replied:

Thanks! Does everyone have the weird problems?

Just checking to see if, you know, all men are mortal.

It was a rough but productive day. I plowed through the problems with a kind of desperate resolution. First of all, there were no links. I sat down to write the Daily Office and filled in three of the eight hours right away. Three hours later, I hadn’t added anything. After lunch, something budged and the logjam broke. I suspect that it was the difficulty of finding a good link for Lauds that put me in a curatorial funk. It was so bad that the best thing that I could come up with was the Schjeldahl–Dyer duel! But the Aesthete came to the rescue, with a gorgeous picture of Penelope Tree.

Then there were the Dymo woes. I wanted to print a lot of labels. Twelve of the labels were for bubble envelopes that I was planning to send to various friends. In the envelopes were twenty or so of the lovely little calendars that Kathleen had printed last December. She was going to send them out to clients as a business Christmas card, but I don’t think that that happened. In March or April, I had the bright idea of foisting a portion of the stockpile off on friends. You see how quickly we move here.

The other labels were for CDs that I’ve removed from jewel boxes and plan to store in lovely file drawers from Exposures.

That is what I was going to do with an hour or two of the afternoon. But the Dymo label printer was in a bad mood. It wasn’t until after I’d rebooted, reinstalled, and installed on another computer that I finally had the idea of pressing one of the blue lights on the printer. That fixed it. There was never at any time a jam. There was just a bad mood.

I persevered. It all got done.

Then there were sign-up issues at YouTube, and the “weird problems.” I want to say that I could cope better with these difficulties if they made any sense, but death and disease don’t make any sense, not really.

*

I read Glenway Wescott’s The Pilgrim Hawk this morning (when I still fancied myself ahead of the curve). I can’t say that I much liked the writing, despite what Michael Cunningham has to say about it.

The same might be said of Wescott the novelist, whose eye is so cold and precise, so hawklike, that the novel itself might suffer from an excess of clarity and a dearth of passion if it weren’t redeemed by its language.

Its language reminds me of a formdible old lady, a humorless veteran of magnificent causes, who lives in a Greenwich Village flat, surrounded by bibelots that, if you’re good, she’ll condescend to explain to you, one by one. What she won’t do is smile from her heart.

Drunkenness does superimpose a certain peculiarity and opaqueness of its own — monotonous complexion, odd aroma, pitch of voice, and nervous twitch — on the rest of a man’s humanity, over the personality that you have known sober. But worse still is the transparency and the revelation, as it were sudden little windows uncurtained, or little holes cut, into common recesses of character. It is an anatomy lesson: behold the ducts and sinuses and bladders of the soul, common to ever soul ever born! Drunken tricks are nothing but basic human traits. Ordinary frame of mind is never altogether unlike this babble of morbid Irishman. I felt the sickish embarrassment of being mere human clay myself. It seems to me that only art has the right to make one feel that. I am inclined to detest anyone who makes me feel it, as you might say, socially.

I’m not entirely sure what all of that means, but the parts that I understand are not attractive.

*

Message from the sysop:

Okay I’ve found information where the newest driver for the wireless card fixes the wireless connection issues.

The bear heads over the mountain, to see what he can see…

Nothing happened today. It was grand — until now. Now, I wish that something had happened today.

In the late afternoon, I ran a few errands, involving multiple rides on the elevator. On each of these rides but the last one, the elevator stopped at the third floor. Nobody got on; nobody got off. The last time it happened — and I fancy that this is why it didn’t happen again — my eye was teased by the ghost of a darting wraith, while my ear was tickled by a shriek of glee. Although I didn’t want to get the little ones into trouble, I stopped at the doorman’s desk to report the evident infraction. If you’re going to play with the elevators in New York City, pushing buttons just for the fun of it, you need to know the consequences — before they involve lynching.

You probably think that kids love to play with elevators, but that’s not true. Elevators are pretty boring, really — that’s why we grown-ups like them. What kids are playing with when they play with elevators are the adult passengers. The kiddies on the third floor would have given up the game in two minutes if there hadn’t been hapless old folks (twenty and up) looking a little confused, wonderring if they ought to hold the doors for someone in a hurry. Those of us who can remember being eight years old endeavor to pretend that this sort of thing happens all the time. Otherwise, you’re playing right into the kids’ hands.

Older children, the ones who suddenly find themselves on the hither side of puberty, are fond of pushing all the buttons on the elevator. This always strikes victims as totally dumb as well as unspeakably malignant, but it’s a move worthy of Sartre. By making people who have somewhere to go stop pointlessly at floor after floor, a teenager imposes the tedium of his or her miserable existence on all the humbugs who are delusional enough to think that, just because they’re paying a mortgage and getting laid on a regular basis, they’ve got their act together. Ha!

This is why there is no elevator-game theme park in New York City. You’d never be able to sign up enough adult victims to keep the patrons interested.

My plan for this evening was to go to Greenpoint with Ms NOLA to a book event starring Maud Newton and Kate Christensen. Ms NOLA gave me her galley copy of Trouble, Kate Christensen’s new, fifth novel, two weeks ago; I got round to writing it up about an hour before it became clear that I would not be making it to Greenpoint. Had the event taken place in Manhattan somewhere, I’d probably have killed myself to get to it — I admire Kate Christensen’s work no end — but Greenpoint is still, for me, terra incognita. It wasn’t a question of directions; Ms NOLA would have got us there without ado. It was simply never having been to that part of Brooklyn. For a hit parade of reasons, today was not the day to acquaint myself with a new-to-me part of Gotham.

I had thought that writing up Trouble would be fairly straightforward. I had a reasonably clar idea of the aspect of the novel that I wanted to write about.  But I didn’t know the novel well enough to do the job; I’d only read it once. I wasn’t planning some in-depth Da Vinci Code reading of Trouble, which I had found very straightforward on the first reading. The trouble was that the book turned out not to be so straightforward upon the closer look that any write-up occasions. The meaty center of the book takes place in Mexico City, and I thought that I would write about that, but going over the first hundred pages, which take place right here in Rivers City, I wondered what I’d been thinking. Trouble is like a Hitchcock film: it’s written for the second reading.

Which is very nervy of Ms Christensen — if (as I can’t doubt) she’s aware of this aspect of her art. It’s one thing to ask a bloke to sit through a two hour movie a second time, or even a third, just so that he understands the voyeurist imagery of Rear Window (say). It’s quite another to ask even the most literate blighter to re-read a three-hundred page novel just to “get how it’s done.” It’s not that some mystery is revealed, not that at all. Any more than is the case with Hitchcock. It’s just that the richness of the production can’t be grasped the first time: you don’t know what you’re looking for. The second time, you don’t have to look: it falls on you like plaster in a catastrophe, and you wonder how you missed it.

Like Hitchcock, Kate Christensen is a mistress of the vernacular. She does not deal in the sharp artiness that for me constitutes the East Coast intellectual snob’s safe harbour. You can read Trouble without registering that Ms Christensen is a serious novelist — the first time, anyway. It’s the same with Hitchcock: the man presented himself as a popular entertainer, almost as a vaudevillian.  Hitchcock’s elegance is not apparent if you’re thinking of Henry James or Colm Tóibín. Kate Christensen is even more modest: she writes as if she were undertaking nothing more arduous than this entry. As the author of this entry, however, I’m uniquely placed to note the richness of composition in Ms Christensen’s everyday-sounding work.

So, what was going to be a simple bit of praise for the new novel alarmingly devolved into an ambitious think piece that I wasn’t prepared to write well. So I did the only thing that could be done: I watched a video with Kathleen.

It was a nice out-and-about day. The out-and-about part lasted for about four hours. First, I had two neighborhood errands. Never mind about them. Then, the Museum. After the Museum, I stopped in at Crawford Doyle for a copy of The New Valley, Josh Weil’s triptych of novellas (lovely phrase; everyone’s using it; and especially resonant after a stroll through the Museum’s Netherlandish gallery), and then walked down 81st Street to Willy’s, my barbershop.

Since the wait wouldn’t be long, I sat down and started in on “Ridge Weather,” the first of the novellas. It was not possible to take the measure of the prose, though, because a radio was blaring “Baby Love” and bringing back memories of a Supremes dance party at an off-campus house in South Bend in 1969, um, forty years ago. Also there was a futbol game on the television. In the barber chair, I did not attempt to read; my spectacles get in the way.

There are two barbers at Willy’s, and the customer in the other chair was — what? Not fully grown but beginning to be full of it. Baby fat lasts longer in these precincts than it does elsewhere, for obvious reasons, but that is all that the kid was carrying: it was entirely in his face. He rather aggressively spoke Spanish with the barber, and if that made me wince a little it made me smile a lot. At the end of his trim — I could see everything thanks to mirrors in front of and behind me — I got to see the application of this mysterious mousse that I hear about, and that makes me wonder what the men who wear it are thinking. (Young ladies have informed me that it is a lot more like Brylcreem than anything I’d ever put in my hair — if I had any.) I wish you could have seen the kid puff up when he asked for “five dollars back”; among the many other things that he was new to was the swagger of tipping. Then there were the handshakes and the hasta lew-ego!

(I was so much worse at his age — but I don’t want to sound competitive here.)

Then to Agata & Valentina, for a chunk of reggiano parmegiano. Somehow, the bill came to $123.63. I guess I did buy a few other things, among them a hunk of salami — well, more like the stern of a salami — for (let’s see here) $36.40. Just an ounce or two shy of three and a half pounds — not bad! As Kathleen said, salami lasts forever, and, yes, it does. The end isn’t always as pleasant as the beginning, but it does last. I’ll let you know when it’s finished, but not my age and weight.

There were two shows to see at the Museum — two that I hadn’t seen, that is. And can you believe that I read about one of them in The Eonomist? That was strange. The Times must have written it up, and I must have missed the write-up. Pen and Parchment: Drawing in the Middle Ages. I won’t say much about this breathtaking show now, except this: while the drawings reproduce nicely in the catalogue, what does not reproduce is the ninth-centuryness of the drawings that are that old. The Museum may be full of items that are far older than c 840 CE, but, as books go, c 840 CE is old. Over a thousand years old, and there it is, under glass, looking as crisp as if it were bound up yesterday, and there I am, standing in a city that didn’t exist for most of the intervening millennium, and in a building that most of the people around me probably took for antique.   

And the drawings are amazing. Sure, you’ve seen stuff like it before — but not quite like it. There’s an Ascension in the margins of one book that’s really quite Baroque.

The other show was a modest collection of photographs from the Second Empire. It’s astonishing, what can happen in twenty years. I feel that nothing half so dramatic as the rise and fall of Napoleon III and the recreation of Paris has occurred since 1989. Allowing, that is, for their lack of telephones, light bulbs, central heating and (for all but a few early adopters) indoor plumbing. The Second Empire was definitely the Western World’s first caffeinated jolt of modern times.

When I got home, I cleaned up and wrote my head off. I do wish that Eric Patton would publish his fascinating and enviable posts on Thursdays and Fridays, because reading them (which can’t be helped) on Daily Office days cuts into the dutiful consumption of feeds.

I’m a bit agitated at this evening. That’s the word for it, too. I’m not anxious, really, or worried, or fretful; just stirred up. All right, I’m a litle bit fretful. WiFi connectivity issues again. Nothing like yesterday’s, but now that I have some perspective I can give you an idea of how screwed up things were yesterday morning.

• TimeWarner had a brief problem that shut down Internet access (although not “connectivity” for a little while — so far as I know, it lasted for no more than fifteen minutes. So that was one reason for the 404.
• Then there was the netbook’s power save/WiFi access problem that I didn’t even know about. Again, signals loud and strong, but no connection.
• Finally, the WiFi booster in the bedroom has been giving us both grief. I suspect that the cable connecting the router to the booster (without which the booster wouldn’t be worth the electiricity that it consumes) has been crimped by running, for a winter, beneath two sash windows. Must replace.

The hair it tears. How’s one to fix what’s on the fritz when everything is on the fritz?

For the rest of it, though, I was simply agitated, like clothes in a washing machine. I got a tremendous amount of writing done. That ought to leave one calm and glowing, but it rarely does, perhaps when nothing is actually finished. Not finishing things is fine; I’m trying to get into a rhythm of working on things, instead of trying to dash them off in one go. Call me ‘elated’ rather than ‘contented.’ Agitated.

At eleven at night, an old friend called, to announce a long-considered career change. And a long-expected one. I’d been worried about the posture of the decision, foreseeing one of those “You-can’t-fire-me-because-I-quit” scenarios that sound good for about a minute. As it is, nothing in our friend’s situation precludes an animacable parting of the ways. At our age, though, this sort of thing is serious, heart attack serious. Our friend almost had a heart attack just making the final steps toward the decision. Agitating.

During the day, my Web master and I exchanged several emails about automating the DVD project that I’ve been writing about this week in the Diary; we also came to terms on a plan that meets all requirements of masculine interest: it’s more ambitious, more expensive, and more exciting than anything that crossed my mind on Monday. It’s so serious, in fact, that, as I wrote to Steve, I don’t for once have ants in my pants. Hey, I’m still getting used to Blidgets, and feeling guilty about having so few fabulous insights for the Aviary of Ideas. Ambition + expense + excitement = Agitation.

Finally, there was the croaking woman. I had picked up supplies at the Food Emporium and collected the mail, and I was waiting for the elevator by myself when a shortish woman in a blonde bob that she was much too old for wheeled up on her cell phone. She was walking, but she seemed to glide; she was certainly oblivious. How stupid do you have to be to walk right up to an elevator door that is not unlikely to open on a crowd of exiting passengers. But she was on her phone, talking in a toneless baritone that so dramatically amplified the awfulness of her yakking that I could not board when the elevator arrived. I could not trust myself to share the space with her. Had I followed her into the elevator cab, I should have been obliged to set down my shopping bags and apply a garrotte to her neck. The woman was the most socially unacceptable creature that I have seen since the New Year. A package of heedlessly obnoxious unattractiveness, she needed to be tossed to the lions — but the lions are in the Bronx, and presumably too well-fed not to be as repulsed by her as I was. Che agita!

I’d love to say that I know of something that’s going to stop the agitation and quiet me down, but I don’t. Once again, I’m wondering how I got to be sixty  before I confronted the fact that I am, very simply, high strung.

Kathleen stayed home today, of course, but she felt a little better as the day wore on; in fact, she began to be bored — always a good sign. I felt better, too, once I’d talked to the doctor, who reassured me by confiding that, three weeks ago, he was laid low with the same symptoms.

And that was all there was to today. Little jobs, bits of reading, work on the Daily Office. A very special and unlooked-for package in the mail; the moment I spied the return address, I began (rather entitledly, I confess) to hope that it contained something like what in fact turned out to be inside. On the drawbacks side of the ledger, the netbook had connectivity problems that seemed to have something to do with — but it turned out to be something else entirely, something that I should never have thought of, or known how to fix. My patron saint proxied the machine about an hour ago and determined that the cut-outs had something to do with the netbook’s power management protocols. It seems that I toggled into the wrong mode. There is much to be learned &c.

Meanwhile, my DVD/Portico project bumped along nicely. My other patron saint reminded me of — duh! — the <br> tag. It is totally typical that I have been able to conceive of this project, for which I have great ambitions — as a way not only of keeping track of my movies but of grouping them in “if you liked this you’ll like that” arrangements, and making Web pages out of it to boot — while forgetting all about the <br> tag in the middle of it all. That’s why I did not become a mathetmatician. It’s why I was great at trigonometry. In trigonometry, there are tables to remind you which particular version of <br> you needed.  

Meanwhile, Jean Ruaud published a third gallery of New York images at SmugMug over the weekend, and they’re all great, but I love the shots of the Cloisters more than I can say, especially the one of this feller.

Oops. I came home from an evening at the theatre determined to scribble a few notes about the play that we saw, Accent on Youth, at MTC — starring the fantastic David Hyde Pierce. Whilst taking little rests from that exercise, I checked in at Facebook, &c &c. Is there anybody at Facebook older than I am? If so, I don’t want to know it — that would be even more depressing. In any case, I forgot all about my dear diary.

Considering last night’s 3 AM lights-out, I was up fairly early (9:20). I can’t tell you what I did this morning, so let’s call it fractal. I had a fractal morning. Fractal is how I always feel after a few hours with Google Reader. Eventually, I had lunch, and then I wrote drafts for two Portico pages — the minimum.

And then the fun began, except I’m being ironic; the attempt to print three checks via Intuit reminded me that the desktop computer does not like to print checks — although it will print reports. Also two of the ink cartridges had to be replaced — or so the machine told me; how’m I supposed to know for certain? The whole printer/running  back and forth the length of the apartment business lasted for just about an hour. I did not have a tantrum, because I didn’t have time for a tantrum. I wanted to clear up the paperasse, and I succeeded. It worked out well, actually. Ordinarily, when I’ve had a productive day, I wish I could just stay home and be even more productive. The printer nonsense made going out seem a godsend.

When we came home, I saw that someone was waiting for me to confirm a Facebook friendship. I did so at once, and then I gave Kathleen five guesses at who it was. “You’ll never guess” got narrowed down in ways that I can no longer recapture. I wish I could, because Kathleen guessed right the first time.

It’s raining, it’s pouring, and this old man wants to snore.