When I got up this morning to fix Kathleen’s tea and toast, I knew that I’d be getting back into bed as soon as we had read the paper. I’m on the edge of a cold, and the very fact that I wanted to go back to bed indicated exhaustion. So I lay propped up on pillows and listened to four of the seven disks of Is It Just Me?, Miranda Hart’s wonderful book, in which the cast of characters from Miranda — Gary, Stevie, Penny, Tillie, Clive and the rest — are replaced by Miranda Hart, aged 18. Little M, as the author calls her, barges in on the reading from time to time to complain bitterly, in Tillie-like tones, about her elder self’s complete failure to realise any of her girlish expectations, only to learn that, in fact, actual dreams were realized instead. I cried at the end. I laughed throughout.

But I was also exhausted, and I fell asleep during the bit about Peggy, her dog. Rude!

***

We spent a lot of time with Will this weekend, on Friday evening and for most of Sunday. I was unable to get him to take a nap on Sunday afternoon; it was only when his mother arrived to pick him up that he let go and fell asleep. So we let him stretch out on the bed and had a nice long chat. In my impartial view, he is simply the best kid ever.

I used to have a small television in the kitchen. A screen with a built-in DVD player, it didn’t cost very much and it worked well enough for a few years. Then it developed a sound problem that auxiliary speakers didn’t solve. This was a serious drawback, because I don’t so much watch movies in the kitchen as listen to them, giving the picture an occasional glance, while I’m working. It got to where I could hear the sound only when standing perfectly still. So, in the middle of last month’s dishwasher crisis, I decided to get rid of the thing, in the interest of opening up counter space for a dish-drying rack. When the crisis subsided, I meditated on a replacement.

I will spare you my thought process. The old television’s replacement is not in the kitchen. I already owned the most expensive component, an iPad. For a third of its list price, I bought an Altec dock from Amazon. I moved the wireless booster in the living room so that the signal would reach the corner of the foyer nearest the kitchen. (My tech guy tells me that New York City’s rules about plastering walls over chicken wire makes each of the rooms into a “Faraday cage.” I haven’t looked that up yet, but I love the idea of living in one.) And I subscribed to Netflix.

Before doing a couple of things in the kitchen yesterday morning, I browsed through Netflix in search of an action/adventure movie, which is the sort of thing that I find most entertaining while battling with pots and pans, and came across Ca$h, a French film starring Jean Dujardin that I hadn’t, for some reason, been able to acquire in DVD form. I see that there is another film of the same name, released two years later and starring Sean Bean, but I doubt that it’s a remake. Eric Bésnard’s film is a sparkling, light-fingered caper that doesn’t wait for the ending to pop a few surprises. Almost everyone in the story is a con artist, and Bésnard keeps you guessing while beguiling the eye with luxury settings and beautiful women (Alice Taglioni and Valeria Golino). It is arguably Jean Dujardin’s best film, because it highlights his breathtaking insouciance while keeping a lid on the actor’s inner doofus/clown. I wonder if the film’s availability at Netflix foretells an American release, with subtitles.

Ca$h was not a good choice for the kitchen, though; my French isn’t that good. I wound up watching it after dinner, with headphones, in my reading chair.

***

It’s a dreary, wet day, and I’d love to stay home, but I have an appointment with the Mohs surgeon right after lunch, and a date to pick up Will after school, to take him for a haircut. It’s terrible of me, but I can’t remember: will this be his fourth haircut or his fifth? Whatever it is, I plant to sit down in the back this time, and not hovering around the chair. It’s no longer necessary — it probably wasn’t necessary the last time — and the barber will be happy to have me out of the way.

Yesterday, I almost copied the first of the following passages, from David King’s Vienna, 1814, into the day’s entry. I’m glad that I waited. I did mention that I was going to continue re-reading Adam Zamoyski’s Rites of Peace as soon as I was finished with King, but later decided to return to Zamoyski at once. The frame of Zamoyski’s narrative is larger than King’s; whereas King begins in Vienna, with preparations for the Congress, Zamoyski starts in December, 1812, with Napoleon’s lightning return to Paris from the debâcle in Russia. Fully a third of the book covers the campaigns, military and diplomatic, of 1813. We get to know most of the principal players very well. But Talleyrand is not introduced until page 173.

Talleyrand was the undoubted genius of the Congress. He would have been a brilliant aristocrat at any time, but the upheavals in France that coincided with his maturity allowed him to exploit a strategic boldness (not to mention a grasp of public relations) that would have gone unused in times of peace. King repeats Napoleon’s two most pungent quips about Talleyrand: “shit in silk stockings” is one. “I have made two mistakes with Talleyrand — first, I did not take his good advice, and second, I did not have him hanged when I did not follow his advice.” Zamoyski can put off mentioning Talleyrand for so long because, during 1813, Talleyrand was no longer serving Napoleon as Foreign Minister; he was simply the Chamberlain, a ceremonial role that freed him to connive with the Bourbons.

Instead of writing at greater length about the importance of Talleyrand &c, I want to compare the way in which a particular nugget of gossip about the man is handled by my two authors. I call it “gossip” not because it’s untrue but because it’s personal information of a vaguely scurrilous nature that we can be sure Talleyrand himself wanted to be generally known: one of his most successful tactics was to dazzle interlocutors with his courtly eccentricities. The very idea of entertaining guests while getting dressed reeks of royal diffidence, and Talleyrand had a magical capacity to swell to royal dimensions in the absence of the genuine article. So he and his valets choreographed a routine that was duly captured by eyewitnesses.

Getting ready for the day ahead, Talleyrand entered his dressing room and took his seat by a porcelain stove. Three valets waited on him, one supervisor and two assistants dressed in gray livery, covered with long aprons. The team began removing his flannel and stockings from the night before, and placed them in a bucket of eau de cologne. One handed him a cup of camomile tea, and the others set about taking away the rest of the night garments, the “drawers, vests, dressing gowns, with all sorts of odds and ends flopping about.”

After the nightcap, a cambric bonnet tied with lace ribbon around his neck, was removed, two valets attacked his hair, “combing, curling, pomading and powdering him.” In the meantime, Talleyrand refreshed himself with a glass or two of warm water, which he then emptied into a silver basin, as one eyewitness described the maneuver, “sucked in through the nose and spit out, much the way the elephant uses his trunk.”

A warm cloth was applied to his face, and his feet were washed in unpleasant, medicinal eau de barèges, dried, and then perfumed. His valets put on his white silk stockings, his breeches, and his shoes. As he stood up, the valets skillfully removed the last dressing gowns and maneuvered the shirt over his head — everything was done modestly, as he often entertained guests at the same time. By the end of the lengthy ritual, usually just under two hours, Talleyrand was immaculately dressed in velvet, silk, and satin. He was ready for his first showdown.

King notes his sources for this picture; they include the memoirs of the Comte de Rémusat, which mention the elephant snort. Zamoyski relies only on Rémusat. But observe the way the same material is structured.

Talleyrand was at his toilette. This was a remarkable daily performance, often enacted before a series of callers who, in the words of one who witnessed it, could at first “see only an enormous assemblage of flannel, felt, fustian, percale, a mass of white” being attended by two valets in white aprons under the direction of a third in silk stockings and powdered wig. From the upper reaches of this ragged mass, out of a coil of cravats, jutted a firm chin, a permanently curled lip and a small upturned nose. The valets would begin by removing the woollen stockings and strips of flannel from his legs, which were plunged into a small basin of mineral water. This was the only part of Talleyrand that was ever exposed. “The remaining parts of his person were covered by drawers, waistcoats, dressing gowns, with various pieces of cloth hanging off every bit of him, and his head wrapped in a kind of tiara of percale, held in place by a pale colured ribbon,” continues the diarist. “The two valets would then begin to comb, curl, pomade, powder, while he dabbed at his face with swabs which he dipped in a silver dish held before him for the purpose. Among the more remarkable elements in his toilette was one, curious enough to overcome the disgust one might have experienced witnessing it, which involved the consumption of one or two large glasses of tepid water which he sucked in through the nostrils and then ejected, more or less like an elephant, through his nose.’

Interestingly, Zamoyski sets the scene in Paris, while King has it in Vienna. The difference is inconsequential in itself — the ritual was enacted every day wherever Talleyrand happened to be — but King does something else that shows up the difference between writing history and writing for Vanity Fair. He embeds the toilette in his account of a particular day, the one on which the Great Four Powers finally condescended to receive the French plenipotentiary. That’s the “showdown” to which King refers. Zamoyski is writing of a particular day, too, just before the arrival of Allied forces in Paris several months earlier. But Zamoyski begins by detaching anecdote from history. Talleyrand’s toilette is an entertaining sidebar, and Zamoyski quotes the block of Rémusat as a way of indicating that he, Zamoyski, does not consider this material worthy of historical re-evaluation.

King, in contrast, works hard to convey the illusion of you-are-there. Instead of Zamoyski’s single, streamlined paragraph, we have three short paragraphs of one-damned-thing-after-another. The climax of the anecdote — the elephant business — is not saved for the end, where it serves to nail the fact that this is an anecdote, but presented in chronological order, as a kind of pseudo-history. Or, as it might be, a shooting script. Throughout his book, King strives to put the reader in the picture, and he is very good at it. But genuine history is concerned with keeping the reader out of the picture. Historians struggle to present the past as comprehensible (up to a point) but not familiar. This is not because “no one really knows what happened.” It’s precisely because we do know what happened. At least, we know most of what happened that matters, and more and more and more of it as the period in view approaches our own. But to know how things are going to work out is lose a fundamental quality of life as it is lived, which is in ignorance. This is the price of learning history, and many, perhaps most, readers consider it too steep, because they have not been taught history’s rich uses.

I’m not going to make nice and say that I think that these books are equally excellent in their respective ways, because in the end the Vanity Fair way is so decidedly inferior. It is designed to skirt perplexity, and it does not encourage thinking about structural problems such as the nature of power — something we understand very poorly, I believe.

I am thinking of reading the notes to David King’s Vienna, 1814. And just the notes. By chance, my eye fell on a long one just now, about the letters of the Empress Marie Louise — how they turned up here and there in Europe after her death — and I couldn’t stop reading it. King’s writing in the notes is somewhat less frothy than his text, which can only be called tarted up. Both notes and text read like an article in Vanity Fair, but the relative sobriety of the notes, which discuss King’s sources, suggests that it’s the reporter’s job that really interests him. His attitude to the Congress of Vienna is more jaded; he writes of it with something of the tabloid muckraker’s disingenously wide-eyed shock. It’s an assignment that he’s got to sell. So we’re treated to an invasive account of Talleyrand’s morning toilette, frequent references to thousands of blazing candles, and the ballerina Emilia Bigottini’s “breathless performances.” There is also a pile-up of infelicities, such as the gratingly repeated “Vienna Congress” (King appears to dislike the word Viennese), the “Russian tsar,” and “quick diligence.”

My complaints are not very heartfelt; of all the historical events that I can think of, the Congress of Vienna is the one most deserving a Vanity Fair-style treatment. Like a grand country house, the Congress had a business side and a pleasure side, and as pleasure sides go, it was the Versailles of glittering turnouts. A tsar, an emperor, the King of Prussia, with all the sisters and their cousins and their aunt living in the same palace — it’s a wonder the Hofburg didn’t levitate. The antics of Talleyrand, the rivalry of the “Russian siren” (Princess Bagration) and the “Cleopatra of Courland” (Wilhelmine de Sagan), two ladies installed on the same floor of a building called the “Palm Palace” — it’s wonderful stuff; wonderful fluff. I’m delighted to learn that Nesselrode pudding, which was still appearing on menus when I was a boy, was concocted in the French plenipotentiary’s kitchens. Not to mention all that waltzing! (It’s a pity that King offers only a translation of the Prince de Ligne’s famous pun, “Le Congrès ne marche pas, il danse,” in English only. Marcher means “to function” as well as “to walk.”) Above all, there is the superb fatuousness of Prince Metternich, torn between saving the world and holding on to Cleopatra’s affections. King is not bad about the business side, but he is careful not to try the reader’s patience with complexities.   

But I’m going straight back to Adam Zamoyski’s more comprehensive Rites of Peace, which I began (re-) reading by mistake, as soon as I’m done with King. Which won’t be long; the pages fly by.

***

On Monday, I opened up the work that I began on Fire Island — I have divulged the name here, but I prefer to call it “my writing project” — for the first time since vacation, and looked over what I’d done. I added more material yesterday. But I haven’t found the tone yet. That’s not terribly important at this stage, I don’t think; at any rate, it’s not as vital as simply getting things down. I looked at the section on “Books” and realized that the second sentence was really the beginning of the section’s ending. So I hit “enter” and wrote something else. I began to see that I don’t understand very well just what it is that books mean to me. There’s a sense in which they’re too intimate to have a meaning. There’s another, though, in which they’re just books. I keep them because I have always kept them, which is a good reason and a bad reason all in one. The good reason is the utility, convenience, and continuity of a library. The bad reason points to the lack of a rigorous criterion for disposing of books. I think that I’m pretty good, now, about not holding onto books that aren’t that great. But I have books that I bought thirty years ago and more, for reasons and in pursuit of interests that are now obscure. But they’ve always been there, on the shelves! How can I dump them now? Well, he said, rolling up his sleeves and opening a shopping bag, watch me.

Michelle Goldberg, writing in The Nation, does not think very highly of Robert O Self’s All in the Family: The Realignment of American Democracy Since the 1960s, but she gives him credit for coming up with a very handy label, “breadwinner conservatism,” that explains the alignment of patriarchal family values with starve-the-beast fiscal views. The term explains it so well, in fact, that I’m encouraged to hope that Democrats and progressive people generally will finally understand their opponents and the depth of that opposition. Goldberg wraps up,

The contemporary conservative movement has succeeded in part by painting the government as the ultimate cause of emasculation. As Ryan said in his speech at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, “None of us — none of us should have to settle for the best this administration offers — a dull, adventureless journey from one entitlement to the next, a government-planned life, a country where everything is free but us.” Seen in this light, any man who longs for a life with more authority, vitality and dignity, who wants to control his own destiny and that of his family, must battle against the suffocating power of the state. Further, in this view, the more privileges government accords to women or minorities or the poor, the more its supremacy grows. Self understands this. As he writes in the epilogue, “breadwinner conservatism legitimated the transition to a neoliberal ethos in American life; heterosexual male breadwinners, as conservatives saw them, were not dependent on the state for either welfare or rights.*

This is nothing new to me, but I don’t think that I’ve ever put it more succinctly. Here we have the issue that divides the country. It has wrinkles — the role of the black heterosexual breadwinner, for example, rests on an ambiguous revival of the “separate but equal” thinking that manifests itself in gated community and Christian academies throughout the South — but it remains the issue. There are no other issues, because no other issue can be debated and decided until this one is settled. I myself don’t see how it can be settled within the framework of one sovereignty. Patriarchy is as repugnant to me as slavery would have been two hundred years ago. I would not go to war over it, not because I lack courage but because I have no faith in the ability of war to settle cultural issues. Rather I would argue for a partition of the nation, at least into two autonomous provinces. I have no time for men who want “more authority, vitality and dignity” in their lives — I know that that’s code for — and I don’t want them setting bad examples for boys in my community. I believe that they are wrong precisely to the extent that they believe in their righteousness — their righteousness is the very seal of their error. They fail to acknowledge that their preferred way of life diminishes the lives of others. They entertain a perfectly adolescent idea of their inherent superiority as human beings: the formula “all men are equal” bears an occult limitation to “normal” or heterosexual men, but otherwise it means only what it says. The corollary is clear: Men and women are not equal. This is as reactionary as the medieval thugocracy’s belief in its inherent superiority — and just as doomed. Eventually, we shall leave such thinking behind. But I often fear that Americans will be among the last to do so.

*Goldberg finishes with a sour sentence (“While All in the Family names and defines this way of thinking, it ultimately doesn’t do much to illuminate it.”) that dampens the thrust of these powerfully-phrased observations.

***

Kathleen took forever to get home from North Carolina last night, thanks to spotty weather over LaGuardia; I passed the time reading Adam Zamoyski’s Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna, under the mistaken impression that I hadn’t read it already. I thought that I’d read the other fat book on the same subject that stood next to it on the shelf: David King’s Vienna, 1814: How the Conquerors of Napoleon Made Love, War, and Peace at the Congress of Vienna. But, no. Zamoyski’s book came out in 2007, and King’s in 2008, which is why I didn’t read it; I’d just read Zamoyski. Not surprisingly, Zamoyski’s account was familiar, but it never occurred to me that it ought to be. Now I shall set it aside and read King, which promises to be a somewhat frothier tome.

I have long nursed the notion, which I haven’t mentioned recently, that modern manners were set at Vienna. I’m thinking of table manners in particular, but also, more generally, of the way to behave at receptions. Mind, I don’t claim that they were invented in 1814. But at this gathering of the great and good, representing almost every corner of Europe, the endless round of dinners and balls encouraged the evolution of a standard way of doing things. What also encouraged consensus was the severely diminished role of the French. French was very much the language of diplomacy and well-bred courtliness, and stylish Parisians were the arbiters of elegance. But the restored kingdom of France did not have its customary place at the head of the table. It had only just ceased to be a defeated empire. This took some of the sting (I surmise) out of adopting and adapting French manners. France would grapple and grope for greatness after 1815, but it was to remain what it is today, a nation of Candides, cultivating their gardens in smart turn-outs. All the more estimable!

In any case, I am always on the lookout for glints of supporting evidence. Even in books that I’ve already read.

Having spent the weekend taking things out of closets and putting them in, I wonder how long it will be take for the word “closeted” — assuming that there’s any use for it at all — to become a dead metaphor, a turn of phrase whose underlying image no longer comes to mind. I’m not a scholar on the point; I don’t know anything particular about how the word came to be used to describe a sexual preference hidden from the world and possibly from the hider. But it seems to me that actual closets are not what they used to be. They are less like attics — those roomy but airless places in which discards become secrets — and more like carry-on luggage, packed as lightly but tightly as possible for the demands of unforeseen circumstances.

Closets can be a terrible embodiment of the saying, “out of sight, out of mind.” Put something in a closet and — forget that it exists! Until, that is, something presses you to find it, and you can’t think where to begin. You can’t even remember if you still have it, whatever it is.

Another closet curse: “This may come in handy some day.” The only things that come in handy some day are the ones that don’t prompt the question. I’ve only read the Introduction, but I’m already wondering if Project Management for Dummies will ever come in handy.

***

While toiling away yesterday, I listened to Juliet Stevenson’s reading of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Victorian sensation novel, Lady Audley’s Secret. I read the novel ten years or so ago, long enough to forget all but the broadest plot points — actually, all that I remembered for certain was that the very pretty Lady Audley is also very wicked. So I enjoyed the sensation quite as much as if I hadn’t read it at all. The quality of the novel itself didn’t much matter, though, because Stevenson’s reading, a three-ring circus of accents and impersonations, completely upstaged it. Juliet Stevenson is one of my favorite actresses, but also one of the most highly seasoned: the roles she plays are almost without exception (I can’t think of any exceptions) keen, sceptical women who don’t suffer fools gladly, even when, like her immortal Mrs Elton, they’re the only fools in the room. In the reading, however, this seasoning dissipated altogether. I forgot that “Juliet Stevenson” was reading. Her impersonations of Sir Michael Audley, the ageing baronet who has married the lovely young woman of unknown provenance, and his nephew, Robert Audley, were consummate in that they made me forget that a woman was doing the talking. (Her rendition of Luke Marks’s deathbed confession was so hearty and vernacular that it put the other characters completely out of mind, just as the confession itself retells key points of the plot.) If Lady Audley’s Secret were a greater book — on a par with Jane Austen or George Eliot — there might have been an unseemliness about the virtuosity of the reading, but all I could think of was how great it would be if Stevenson tackled Wilkie Collins. I lost myself in the feast of storytelling, and I can’t recommend the recording highly enough.

***

I don’t mean to toot my own horn, but, reading Zachary Wolfe’s report of last week’s Orpheus concert, I couldn’t help thinking how wrong-headed it was, from start to finish, especially in comparison with my own. Going on at great length, but without saying anything favorable or illuminating, about the new piece, Earth Echoes, was almost as fatuous as not pronouncing a word of judgment about the performance of Beethoven’s Fifth.

If I had known what was on the program, I should have stayed at home. I didn’t want to go out; I was feeling a bit gassy, and still pale and blank from the previous day’s strange hangover. Kathleen couldn’t go, for a handful of very good reasons. But when I totted up the excuses, they didn’t add up to much, and I bore in mind that the responsibility to attend concerts for which one has purchased tickets is not so much a financial one (there is no waste, if you have something better to do with your time; and your money has gone to a good cause) as a social one: the musicians want people in the seats, of course; but beyond that there’s the need to remind oneself — one’s physical listening apparatus — that the music one loves could not have become known, when it was written, if audiences never showed up for it. It’s the opposite of what they say about the movies (bosh, in my view); it inverts the alleged importance of thrilling to a spectacle in a dark room full of people one can’t see. At a concert, audience response (coughs or the utter absence of coughs, for example) is a register to which musicians are attuned, and a feedback to the audience itself. So I took my seat in Row T and played my part as a member of the crowd welcoming Orpheus to its 40th anniversary season (not its fortieth in Carnegie Hall — I don’t know when that will take place). But if I’d known what was on the program, I’d have stayed home, and made one of the biggest mistakes of my concertgoing life.

Beethoven’s Fifth, that’s what was on the program.

It’s a work that I never, ever listen to. It appears on no playlist. There is a recording, by Carlos Kleiber, much-admired, that I pull out once every ten years. I ought to be very unfamiliar with the Fifth. But I seemed to know every note of it last night. At the same time, and by the miracle that is the Orpheus way with music, I had never heard it before. The Fifth that I had heard before was portentous and saccharine by turns, with gruff bits of fugato and a clanging, “heroic” finale. Fate knocking at the door and all that. The Fifth was a symphony that came in a brass box, lined with dead velvet, reeking of another era’s idea of human greatness. It was a cliché and a bore. Beethoven being “Beethoven.” The Fifth was an unbeautiful leftover.

Last night, however, this is what it was: a piece of music that, at the group’s inception, no member of Orpheus would have considered playing. Forty years on, its performance was still somewhat controversial among the players. But because of the way that Orpheus has developed for learning complex scores and playing them without a conductor, last night’s Fifth came off as a manuscript recently discovered in an attic. The musicians had looked at it every which way, practiced it alone, in groups, in sections, and altogether, and, when they were ready, they decided to play it for the public. What they played sounded like a missing link between Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony and Schubert’s Unfinished, while at the same time making the point that Beethoven, unlike Mozart and Schubert, was not Viennese. Every note, every passage was fascinating. The symphony glistened and gleamed and sounded like music, not some big idea. There were no ideas, except possibly the professional one of outdoing Jupiter‘s last movement.

At the climax, the model and inspiration for a century’s soaring finales (culminating in Schoenberg’s Gurre Lieder and Mahler’s Symphony of a Thousand), instead of daydreaming about heroism and being the best that you can be &c, I choked up at the thought of the once-scrappy little chamber ensemble, playing gigs on the Staten Island Ferry and suchlike, triumphing in the temple of Carnegie, nailing chord after hammering chord in perfect accord, but sounding nothing like the bored orchestras that made music sound like canned fustian when I was growing up. This was no sell-out of the early-music, eclectic-repertoire ethos that prevailed among the generation of musicians from which Orpheus emerged. This was the apotheosis of that ethos: to make something new not by making it different but by making it as best it can be made, from the inside out. 

The event was simulcast on WQXR. I don’t know how much of the grandeur of the performance came through to radio (and Intenet) listeners, but I don’t much care, because you really did have to be there to feel what was happening. You had to be sitting in the hall, coughing or not coughing. (Nobody was coughing.)

***

There were two other works on the program, the overture to Rossini’s L’Italiana in Algeri — an astute warm-up for the Beethoven — and a song cycle for mezzosoprano and baritone, Earth Echoes, by Augusta Read Thomas, a fortyish composer currently working in Chicago. The singers were Sasha Cooke, who had a warm voice, big but firmly in control, and Nathan Gunn, who sounded suave but underpowered. The writing for voice was agreeably lyrical, in contrast to the score for the orchestra, which managed to be both grandiose and meandering, like a monument stumbling about in search of a plinth. (But not as delightful as the Hockney image that my metaphor might suggest.) The texts were drawn from an A-list of world poets (Rumi, Dickinson, Basho, Wordworth, and so on — even Mahler’s adaptation of Wang Wei, from the end of Das Lied von der Erde), and the words were as unintelligible as English always is when it is sung at full voice. (There’s a reason why pop style is an Anglophone invention. It’s the only way our vowels can be understood.) I used to find works like Earth Echoes an utter trial, but years of listening to new works played by Orpheus has made me a connoisseur of virtuoso ensemble playing. At a concert a few years ago, a composer revealed in the program notes that he had set out to write something so difficult that the Orpheus musicians wouldn’t be able to play it, but he soon conceded that he was the one faced with an impossibility. Last night, I watched Laura Frautschi (on whom I am certainly not the only one to have a big crush) beat out the tortuous time with her upper body, whether she was playing her violin or not. I would not dream of passing judgment on Earth Echoes; I’ll leave that to time and future performances. I will only say that Orpheus did not fail to make it very interesting.

Despite (or perhaps in homage to) an inexplicable hangover yesterday — not that it takes much (certainly not intoxication) to induce one — I went to see Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master. Friends had made a point of saying how much they had disliked it, how misled by the “must-see” reviews that this sort of movie is always sure to get. It is a must-see movie. It’s also an unpleasant and disagreeable one, with a disturbing narrative instability. Where is the story going? What is it about? The passages in which these questions recede, as they always recede when films follow familiar trajectories, never last for very long. The Master is certainly not an account of the early days of a Scientology-like cult. It contains the element of such an account, but it plays 52-pickup with them, and never ventures any suggestions about the career of Lancaster Dodd up until the moment that Freddie Quell drifts into his orbit. Lancaster Dodd (the character played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) is a masterful sort of person, certainly — he’s born that way — but what is he a master of? Geoffrey O’Brien, whose acclaim in the The New York Review of Books made me keen to see what he was talking about, writes, “Dodd has the knack of sucking up everyone’s energy and playing it back as if it were his gift to them, all the while visibly delighting in the process, surprising himself with his own capacity to enchant and control.” But he doesn’t enchant us, sitting in the audience. We’re amazed that he gets away with his mountebankery. Amy Adams is lovely as his wife, Peggy, except that we are eventually forced to conclude that she, too, is either crazy or a fake. And Joaquin Phoenix’s Freddie Quell is very hard to watch. He looks dangerous at all times, not just the moments when he means to be.

The movie is set in 1950, an ostensibly “innocent” time, when Americans were trying hard to make being American look superheroic if not supernatural. The postwar settlement was not at all what Main Street had had in mind, and the country’s unwashed isolationism could not be concealed by sophisticated cologne. I don’t think that Anderson means to say that 1950 was an especially crazy time in American life. It appears that he finds American life crazy wherever he picks it up. But in 1950, with the War put away and the Civil Rights struggle still well over ten years off, things looked good. It was a time of shiny cars and big lawns — or shiny lawns and big cars; take your pick. O’Brien writes,

This is where we live, and it is a country of deep loneliness — that same loneliness that permeates all of Anderson’s films, and against which his characters are forever forming themselves into protective families or parodies of families, a population of paternalistic strangers, adoptive sons, surrogate mothers, fake cousins.

And, of course, cults that explain away our smallness and our isolation. Bogus, all of it.

***

Back at home, I picked up The New Yorker and was promptly hurled into an abyss of anxiety by James Surowiecki’s column about the “fiscal cliff.” Surowiecki was explaining why the “pre-commitment” idea hasn’t worked for Congress, and can’t.

For a start, there is no such thing as a single, unified “Congress” that can truly make a resolution—a fact that’s easily overlooked. Instead, there are lots of congressmen, all with slightly different incentives, and there are two political parties, with profoundly different views on the best way to cut the deficit. Then, too, the hopes for an agreement were built on Democrats’ expectation that, when push came to shove, Republicans would vote to raise taxes. This was never going to happen; in fact, most congressional Republicans have signed a no-taxes pledge, which is a kind of pre-commitment device in its own right.

The hidden message here is that the government of the United States can be treated by the various members of Congress as a scapegoat, heaped with impossible obligations and impractical regulations. When the government goes over the cliff, it is the fault of no individual congressmen, and, as Surowiecki points out, we it makes no sense to talk of a collective congressional identity. The United States itself, as a sovereign nation, is without representation in the Capitol. The national interest is off the congressional map. 

It’s easy to feel bleak about the future of this country, especially given the one ray of sunlight — the reasonable expectation that today’s culture wars will recede, and a willingness to compromise reappear, as the Boomers die off. As one of the older members of that admittedly short-sighted generation (possibly the most short-sighted, from having sat too close to the television set as children), I cannot welcome this prospect with unmitigated enthusiasm. And we’re still very much in power — the youngest Boomers are just turning fifty — and our scope for mess-making remains practically unlimited.

***

The Master, although unattractive, is a very beautiful film, even when the settings are banal. Anderson has always been a master of putting his viewers into the picture, without any of the gimmicks of Senssuround or 3-D. His serious approach to composition gives his shots a weightiness that can be oppressive or frightening but never ephemeral; never for a moment are we allowed to reflect that “it’s only a movie.” A great movie is never only a movie. I cannot recommend The Master to anyone who expects to have a good time, but I will claim that it is unsettling in important ways and for good reasons. There is, for example, a scene of truly shocking indecency — and you thought you couldn’t be shocked, no longer knew what indecency was. Well, think again. O’Brien describes the scene lightly, in a sentence that follows the first one that I quoted.

[Dodd] is mischievous, buoyed up by the powers of improvisation that enable him, for example (in a scene that may be a visualization of the dynamics that lie just under the surface), to persuade a roomful of women of all ages to strip for him, in an atmosphere of singalong merriment.

O’Brien doesn’t mention that what makes this scene indecent is the presence of a crowd of clothed men. I cannot wait to hear what the wild lady critics have to say about it. But the scene is not emptily shocking or indecent. It’s telling a terrible truth about the relations between men and women in this country, that we are still not so far from a time when it was considered “cute” of women to abase themselves, not as individuals but as women, and in ways that wouldn not lead to actual physical gratification for anybody. (We are not far at all, if those salacious images of busty topless girls atop motorboats on large Southern lakes are any indication.) I found it the hardest thing to watch in the entire film. It’s of no small interest that Dodd’s persuading is not shown. Anderson simply cuts into the state of nakedness. And nota bene: “of all ages.” <Gasp>

While the dishwasher was out of service, I managed nicely, and didn’t mind washing dishes myself, but I prudently avoided the use of certain implements, such as the Oxo ricer that I depend on for dreamy sweet potato purée. If I had a dishpan, and could leave things to soak for an hour or so, I’d feel more confident about cleaning greasy utensils with small sharp bits. But I don’t have room for a dishpan. Now that the dishwasher is working again, I don’t need one. Last night, we had the sweet potatoes, and they were very dreamy. (I stir in dribbles of butter, cream, and maple syrup.) They accompanied a Piedmontese strip steak that I picked up at Agata & Valentina a few weeks ago (or perhaps even longer ago than that) and, before freezing, covered in dry rub. I discovered the steak while cleaning out the freezer. I try to keep one on hand for nights like last night, when Kathleen works late. Steaks cook quickly, so that I can wait until she actually walks in the door before putting anything in the oven. (The sweet potatoes, on the other hand, can sit around over warm water for hours, and puréed while the steak broils.) A handful of haricots finished the plate.

This is the sort of meal that I hope will become the exception rather than the rule on weeknights. A piece of meat and two vegs, as the British put it, is not only not very interesting but also badly timed: who wants to be cooking at dinnertime? Much better to have soups and casseroles and even salads to warm up or toss and serve forth without fuss.

Last week, I took the leftover breast from a roast chicken and turned it into something not terribly unworthy of the sobriquet “Tetrazzini.” Kathleen and I both grew up with Stouffer’s frozen Chicken Tetrazzini, a pleasant if bland combination of chicken, spaghetti, and cream sauce, and I’ve been working on a recreation. (Some years ago, I found a recipe for the original dish, gala enough to be named after a world-famous opera singer, and was underwhelmed.) My latest mistake: concocting the sauce as a béchamel (milk) instead of as a velouté (broth). I’m also unhappy with my fallback herb, tarragon. I’m not sure that anything but parsley is right. And perhaps I’ll think of something to assist the light punch of nutmeg. But the handful of frozen sweet peas that I toss in when combining (and reheating) all the ingredients is a keeper.

I don’t intend to keep containers of this casserole lying around in the refrigerator. Oh, no. Rather, what I want to master is the portion control that will allow me to put together just enough for two (or three, or however many) a few hours ahead of time, so that all I need to do before sitting down is run a gratin dish under the broiler. I usually have the chicken on hand, and boiling a bit of spaghetti is no big deal. The sauce is the trick, not because it’s difficult to make but because it’s almost impossible to make just enough for two. The basic sauce recipe calls for a cup of scalded liquid to be poured into a cooked mash consisting of three tablespoons each of butter and flour. I could cut the quantities back to one tablespoon each and a third of a cup of liquid, but I’m not sure that I could cook it properly. I’ve never stored sauce as such. New worlds!

Behind this casserole magic is Tamar Adler’s An Everlasting Meal, which the author describes as an homage to MFK Fisher’s How to Cook a Wolf. Fisher was writing about the deprivations of rationing in wartime; Adler’s concern is the long-term urgency of cooking responsibly, not just for health but without waste. The first chapter, “How to Boil Water,” reminds us that Julia Child tasted the salted water that she was bringing to a boil several times along the way. “This may at first feel ridiculous, and then it will start to seem so useful you’ll stand by the pot feeling quite ingenious.” (That’s a typical Adler construction, and where we would expect but.) After presenting a complete re-think of the modern wisdom about cooking vegetables, Adler sends us off to the farmer’s market to buy a real chicken — and boiling that as well. Well! Not boiling, exactly. The chapter is so warm and homely and unspectacular that I’m convinced that I’ve got to master its precepts before continuing with the book.

This is because Adler’s governing idea, as the title suggests, is that no good meal has an absolute beginning. You don’t go to the store and buy everything that you need. You already have some things on hand, such as the chicken breast that I was talking about, or frozen mirepoix, or the remainder of a good sauce from last week. An Everlasting Meal preaches a simple sermon, but one that any cook will quickly see calls for extremely good habits. For one thing, you need to know exactly what you’ve got in the fridge — and how long it has been there. This in turn means that you can’t always make whatever dish suits your fancy; you’re constrained by the perishable ingredients in your larder. (And all ingredients are perishable, eventually, excepting, possibly, salt.) You don’t think in terms of “dinner tonight.” It’s “dinners this week.” The most breathtaking chapter, “How to Stride Ahead,” has Adler coming home with her haul of fresh vegetables and cooking or pre-cooking all of them in the course of an afternoon.

Start checking everything but beets for doneness after half an hour. You may still be scrubbing and washing or peeling. By your fourth or fifth (or tenth) week you will be wiping down your cutting board. By your twentieth, your greens will be nicely washed and cooking in their sauté pans on the stove. For now, stop wherever you are in your preparations and check.

We are not talking recipes here. This is a way of life. And it’s fitting that someone is teaching us at last. This is the final step in replacing the servants who used to possess this wisdom. For several generations, we have tried no more than to prepare the distinct meals that they brought to the table. Now we’re going to learn how to run the kitchen, and to do so in such a way that dinner is not preceded by frenzy.  

As for dinner tonight, I’ve got a spatchcocked chicken, seasoned beneath the breast skin with tarragon butter, mellowing in the refrigerator. Cranberries and spaghetti on the side. (Does anyone know how to make just a little risotto?)

This will be brief. Would you rather it weren’t? Would you like to hear about my day yesterday? I will thank you for your good wishes, because I was lucky at every turn, even the wrong one that the taxi driver took in Harlem. By eight-something in the evening, I was at home,  dressed for fed, and dying for Kathleen to come home so that I could tell her a very funny a story. (You have to know the guy.) But she was very late, and I very tired, so the story will have to wait for this evening. As you can imagine, a day that began with movers and yet ended with a funny story had to have gone well.

I had been given a window of noon-to-four. That’s to say that the mover’s dispatcher would call me between eleven and three to give me an hour’s notice to get to the 62nd Street storage unit. The call came shortly after noon, before I’d even begun to wait for it. I was dressed and ready, of course, so I scrambled outside and hopped into a taxi. I was at the facility in no time. Presently, Ray Soleil appeared, in a last-minute assist. I’d thought that I could manage the day by myself, and I probably could have done, but not so comfortably and companionably; and certainly I should not have arranged the boxes and the balcony furniture and the clothesracks as adroitly as Ray did. But I’m getting ahead of my story. The movers appeared punctually; they carried away, quickly and without incident, the things to be moved; and, although Ray and caught a cab almost immediately, they showed up while I was still filling out paperwork for renting the uptown unit. I was still in bureaucracy mode when the movers were done carting our stuff upstairs. Because of an arrangement between the storage facility and the moving company (and our commitment to rent the unit for a year), I did not have to pay the movers myself, for the moving. But I did have to pay $3.65 for gas. When I was done at the front desk, Ray took me back upstairs to see what he had done (bravo!), and then we walked out onto Tenth Avenue and up to the IRT station at 215th Street. We were done. The entire operation had taken a little over two hours. 

So, now we had a late lunch, at the Seahorse Tavern, and after taking our time over that, we repaired to the apartment, where we had a look at the small plastic storage chests that I wanted to move into the now-vacant center of the 62nd Street space. (The walls are lined with plank-and-cinderblock shelves, laden mostly with books.) There turned out to be five such chests, and only half of the drawers were taken up by Kathleen’s crafts materials. Three large drawers were full of Christmas ornaments, some of them so old and rare that Kathleen won’t let me hang them on the tree. One half-empty drawer contained nothing but pre-recorded cassette tapes, classical albums mostly. Withing a very short space of time, Ray and I reduced the number of chests to be put back into the closets down to two; we taped up two more chests for transfer to 62nd Street, and discarded one. (The poor dining table is littered once again.) Then I freshened up, and, grabbing a framed poster that I’d meant to give to Fossil Darling for his birthday in July, we schlepped the two chests into a taxi, dumped them at the old storage unit, and took another taxi over to the West Side, where Fossil awaited with apéritifs, after a few of which I took him and Ray to Shun Lee West.

I have finally arrived at the point of not waiting for anyone to show up somewhere to something to make it possible for me to get on with this Project that I am Managing (even without the help of Project Management for Dummies, which has not yet arrived): culling the unnecessary from our worldly possessions. While I was out at Fire Island a month ago, I fondly dreamed that I wouldn’t be needing anyone’s help (other than Ray’s now and then), but I wasn’t reckoning with clearing the balcony (I hadn’t thought that it would be necessary so soon) or replacing the motor on the dishwasher. So it is only now, three weeks later, that I find myself where I thought I’d be in the middle of September. Now, at last, I can get to work on the library.

But not today. Please, not today. I have a small job to see to before dinner time, and I have to go to Fairway, but for the better part of the day I will be staring vacantly into space. I’m reading a fabulously funny book, Chuck Thompson’s Better Off Without ‘Em, but rather regretting the funny bits, because Thompson’s “Northerner’s argument for Southern secession” is quite serious at heart; I’ve been saying the same things for years, and feeling like a crazy, cranky outsider for doing so. Thompson’s “language” can be cringe-inducing, and it hardly makes the argument more respectable. The chapter directly ahead of me concerns SEC football, which, as Thompson will, I expect, argue, simply perpetuates the economics of slavery for the sake of entertainment, as if that made it all right. I don’t think I can handle that today.  

“My river,” said Will, in a quiet voice, as we turned onto the FDR Drive at 79th Street to take him home. It was not an assertively possessive statement, not like “MY truck” or “MY teddy bear.” It was, rather, meant to share. The East River is one of Wil’s many possessions, and he felt very good about having it. I was immediately struck that “my river” is what has always linked “my house” to “Doodad’s house.” He has been taxiing up and down the river, between the two flats, all his life. And for all his interest in trucks and cars, what catches his fancy on the Drive is not the immediate traffic but the placid ribbon of water the runs under the bridges and floats the occasional boat. We had stood at the railing of the John Finley walk earlier in the day, and he had been disappointed by the absence of river traffic; a pair of barges lashed to a tug could be seen lumbering along, almost motionless, down off Kip’s Bay, but we couldn’t tell which way they were headed, so we didn’t wait. Now, in the early evening, the taxi slithered from East End Avenue onto 79th and then onto the stub of an access road, and the river in front of us was part of the ride. “My river.”

His river, but it has a name, and he repeated it after I said it. (“East” is not in his vocabulary yet. “Left,” especially, and “right” are.) 

At the corner of 2nd Street and Avenue C, Will surprised me, because I thought, erroneously, that the darkness of night would impair his sense of orientation. It didn’t in the least. He pointed ahead and to the left, over the slim triangle between 2nd and Houston Street, and said, “I go to school that way.” Which was absolutely right. Houston and the Drive (with the river) are the arteries of Will’s everyday travels.

Well, not “everyday” in the case of the Drive. He had not been up to our place since August, before Fire Island. On Saturday, he walked around as if taking inventory. He did claim Kathleen’s teddy bear as his own, and I had to allow that it was hers before it was his. In all fairness, he has never seen Kathleen play with the teddy bear, unless she was playing with him as well. And he does not fully grasp the fact that there was a time when he didn’t exist — when we were here, but he wasn’t. You can see glimmers of comprehension, but it’s nothing to push. He’ll get it soon enough. Will certainly understood that his teddy bear lives in our apartment.

***

It’s a local holiday here, Columbus Day (once upon a time the big Italian-American day), but it’s a working day for Kathleen, and I’ve got some business to attend to this afternoon. At some point between noon and four, I’ll get a call from some movers, to give me an hour’s notice. I’ll run down to the storage unit on 62nd Street and meet up with them. I’ll tell them what to take out off the storage unit, for the move up to the new storage unit in Inwood. Then, I suppose, I’ll go up to Inwood, to see the new unit and to lock it up. I’ll be glad when that’s done. 

Everything that had to be taken off the balcony will go to the new unit, but so will two clothesracks of dresses that Kathleen is determined not to give away, not quite yet. And a piece of furniture, also not to be discarded quite yet. The old storage unit will feel like a ballroom. That won’t last for long. By the end of this weekend (which Kathleen will be spending in North Carolina, visiting her father), I’ll have schlepped any number of bags and boxes down to 62nd Street. I’ll empty out great portions of several closets in the apartment — so that I can fill them up again, don’t ask with what. (I hope that Project Management for Dummies arrives in time to help me do it right.) In a couple of weeks, I may even be able to walk into the blue room without feeling that I’ve fallen into a bog of books.

Wish me luck.

Since the superior repairman departed yesterday, at about 1:35 (he’d been promised for nine-to-noon, and arrived a few seconds before one), the dishwasher has run through two cycles without event, but I still don’t quite trust it. By the time I forget to worry about it — that’s when it will break down again.

This leaves one item on the list of things to be done requiring other people: moving the stuff that we saved from the balcony (chairs, a bench, and boxes of plastic bricks for the flooring) from our storage unit on 62nd Street to a new, smaller one way up in Inwood. This has been penciled in for Monday, even though it’s a holiday for many New Yorkers (not for Kathleen, though), and I’ve got to confirm it this morning. We’ll be sending some other bulky items uptown as well, so the older unit will be almost roomy. More important, two closets in the apartment will open up, when I transfer the drawers of Kathleen’s craft supplies to 62nd Street.

Because the mess in the blue room can’t really be dealt with until the closets are empty, I passed the afternoon organizing our jazz library, something that had gone untouched after a rousing spurt several years ago. I don’t know jazz nearly as well as I know classical music, and I haven’t been very creative with the iTunes playlists; in fact, until yesterday, I had done nothing more than dump all of Keith Jarrett’s trio recordings into a shuffle along with performances by other small groups. It was only the other day that I realized that serious jazz is far more album-centered than classical or pop. Right now, I’m listening to The Comedy, a suite of pieces inspired by commedia dell’arte, written, I suppose, by John Lewis, and played by the Modern Jazz Quartet. These are not cuts to be played out of order, much less shuffled in with other stuff. I might just as easily listen to the CD, but when The Comedy comes to an end, I’ll see if I want to hear one of the many other albums that I loaded onto a Nano yesterday. If I want to hear something else, I have only to upload it from this machine to the Nano.

It has taken years of working with playlists to learn how to do this: how to treat jazz properly, and not like other kinds of music. That said, I’ve ordered Project Management for Dummies. It occurred to me the other day that that’s what housekeeping is: a Project needing Management.  

***

I don’t know how many CDs I have, but it is a great many. As long as ten years ago, it was clear that, unless I wanted to pretend that walls of CD shelving might be regarded as decorative, I had to find some other way of housing the collection. The collections, that is: The operas, the classical CDs, the jazz, the pop, and the curiosities (such as a recording of Jessica Mitford singing “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” — this is the fun part of my library, and it is not small). I should certainly have to lose the jewel boxes. I don’t know whether I hit on a good system before or after I began to use iTunes, but it’s almost complete on the classical front. There are about a hundred classical CDs still to be uploaded into the computer library and then broken down into paper and disc and filed in the appropriate drawer. (It took years to hit on the right way of doing this as well. Having removed everything from the jewel box, I lay down the top matter, the booklet it usually is, then the disc in its new paper sleeve, and finally the back matter, with its handy spine flaps, all oriented so that the flap covers and protects — sort of — the sleeve and the booklet, while presenting a legible label at the top. This would not be a viable system if I needed frequent access to the discs; the back matter’s paper would begin to tear in no time.) 

In the storage unit at 62nd Street, there are about a hundred LPs, perhaps more. I don’t have anything to play them on, but when I did, and attempted to render a few of them into MP3 files, the results were not satisfactory. They say that “vinyl” is valuable now, but I don’t believe that that holds for bread-and-butter classical recordings. A preference for LPs in this day and age strikes me as preposterously affected. I’ve thought long and hard about why I prefer MP3 files to the old analog recordings, and I’ve concluded that I never had much use for sense of “presence,” the capture of the acoustic peculiarities of the recording space. Perhaps because I overdosed on Mantovani at a tender age, I’m not thrilled by luscious string sonorities or other kinds of ear candy. (And, when I want ear candy, I know where to get it: Harold Faltermeyer.) My taste in music is somewhat more abstract, and MP3s simply sound clearer and less cluttered to me. Even in some extremely familiar music, music that I’ve been listening to for fifty years, I’ve heard things — inner lines of counterpoint, mostly — for the first time in MP3 format. When I think of listening to vinyl, all I can imagine is the surface noise — the clicks, purls, and distortions — that I always found terribly distracting. As soon as I can get to them, the LPs are going to HousingWorks.

There was a reason why Vinnie, one of the ladies who takes care of Kathleen’s hair, recommended The Enchanted Cottage, an RKO release from 1945, but it wasn’t that Kathleen and I were about to celebrate our thirty-first anniversary. I still don’t know what brought it up. But as we watched the video last night after dinner, the tears were streaming down my face, because the film’s message is only too true: when you are in love, you are in love with someone beautiful, and this beauty deepens and intensifies as your love grows over the years. The psychologists would probably chalk this phenomenon up to a projected vanity, but of course that’s not what it feels like. What it feels like is wonderful, to be married to be someone so beautiful.

I do not recommend The Enchanted Cottage, however, to anyone who has been married for fewer than thirty-one years. Despite its glints of brilliance, the movie is, overall, dated and unattractive. The exterior sets are barely better than what Ed Wood was capable of — really quite laughably fake-looking. The screenplay, based on a play by Pinero (now there’s a forgotten name), is preachy and cloying. There is a great deal of noble uplift and melodramatic weakness. The performance by Herbert Marshall, as a blind pianist who utters wisdom in his inimitable monotone, is almost camp. Mildred Natwick is pretty camp too, as the laconic widow who owns the cottage, but there’s a wink in her smile that suggests that she might be on loan from John Waters. Spring Byington and Richard Gaines are silly society people, and Hillary Brooke — well, Brooke is blondly gorgeous, but she’s no Claire Trevor, and you can see how she wound up playing third banana to Abbott and Costello. Alec Englander must have been related to the producer, to get the role of the ten year-old boy who guides Marshall’s character around; he looks something like Jerry Mathers but he also makes Jerry Mathers look like Olivier by comparison. The two stars, Robert Young and Dorothy McGuire, however, are very, very good; they do more than their best with the material that they’re given.

The idea is that McGuire is a plain Jane who falls in love with Young when he rents Natwick’s cottage for the honeymoon that he’ll be spending with Brooke. Young is a dashing airman who doesn’t expect to be commissioned anytime soon, but, what’s this? The calendar says “December 7, 1941.” The next thing you know, he’s the phantom of the opera, or nearly; some sort of trauma has caused the right side of his body to sag. His face is disfigured by an operatic scar, a dropping eye, and a pendulous lower lip. It’s really a pretty good job, and it changes him. He’s angry and doesn’t want to see anybody. (Another good job is the recreation of pre-war fashion.) Wounded by the look of disgust that Brooke gave him when he came back from the war (offscreen), he has returned to Natwick’s house to be alone. This naturally entails spending a lot of time with plain Jane.  Guess what: propinquity is nine-tenths of romance.

I forgot to mention that the cottage is enchanted, because that’s the title. The cottage, the opening backstory goes, was rented out for over a hundred years to happy young couples, “for as long as they liked” (presumably until children arrived), by a fine old English nobleman whose great house on the Maine coast had burned down, leaving only a sort of attached outbuilding. Imagine that, a ruin in America! A diamond-paned window has been inscribed with their autographs, as if it were a tree trunk. Young and McGuire get married, as a mutual convenience (turn up the nobility and the weakness), but that’s of course when the enchantment can begin, because now they’re husband and wife. Within a few days, they undergo a change: McGuire sees Young as he was before his crash, and Young sees McGuire as she appears in Gentleman’s Agreement. But other people see them as they really are, so Natwick and Marshall display the greatest tact in not looking at them. Byington and Gaines can’t manage it, and they almost ruin everything. The switches of point-of-view in the final scenes are expert and persuasive: you believe that what the lovers see is real.

I couldn’t stop registering the disparity in physiognomic drawbacks. The right side of Robert Young’s face is really pretty ghastly, something you want to turn away from. Dorothy McGuire, in contrast, is afflicted with nothing that a good hairdresser couldn’t fix. She has one of those Hollywood makeover roles, like Bette Davis’s in Now, Voyager. The moral of the story is that a woman’s love can embrace the genuinely ugly, but don’t expect a man to pursue a woman who can’t be bothered (or lacks the wherewithal) to look sharp.

***

 

Sluggish in yesterday’s rainy weather, I slouched in a chair with two books that I hoped might restart my drudge-addled brain. The first was Pankaj Mishra’s book about three anti-imperialist Asian thinkers of the Nineteenth Century, In the Ruins of Empire. I have always liked Mishra’s reports in The New York Review of Books, and his book is as well-written as one would expect, but I am waiting to encounter something I don’t know. That’s fatuous; there’s lots that I don’t know. But I’m waiting for a genuinely counter-Western viewpoint to develop. In the meantime, I’m meditating on the emergence, in a remote, weatherbeaten peninsula (Europe) of the organizational acumen that made industry and empire possible. And I’m wondering just how prosperous Asia was, before the red-faced barbarians arrived.

Then I turned to Bad Blood, Colm Tóibín’s first book, or his first book of nonfiction, anyway. This was much more congenial, possibly because it traces the backside of empire, as it were, in the form of a walk along the border between Northern Island and the Republic, and intellectual rhetoric does not figure at all. Tóibín blends understated references to the friction between the two nations (not so much North and South as Protestant and Catholic) with gruff travelogue. He writes about himself with an astutely-measured level of detail that is revealing without being self-absorbed. About thirty at the time of the journey, Tóibín was young enough to withstand the hardships that he was old enough to spare himself from time to time. Thus he makes the pilgrimage to Lough Derg’s Station Island, submitting to its rigorous round of pentitential self-denials, even though he is not a believer, only to skip the last step because, well, enough is enough.

They dropped me in the real world, in front of the Railway Hotel in Enniskillen. It was a Sunday morning, almost midday. I bought the newspapers and sat myself down in the Railway Hotel with a pint of Lucozade, soft drinks being permitted on the last day of the pilgrimage, but nothing else until midnight except black tea and dry toast. The Lough Derg spell was broken, however, and the age-old system of self-mortification meant nothing now. I didn’t feel even slightly guilty as I sat among the Sunday drinkers and ordered chicken sandwiches. I devoured them when they came and when I had finished them I ordered more. After a while, I asked for the lunch menu and got through an enormous lunch in the dining room: soup, roast beef, mashed potatoes, chips, carrots, cauliflower, fresh fruit salad and coffee. The pilgrimage was over.

Tóibín is as stoic as the son of any respectable Irish family would be, but he is not ashamed to tell us that he comes to feel very sorry for himself tramping through deluges of rain on the way to Clones, a once-prosperous railway junction that has been put to sleep by the partition. He seems to want to see how far he can go in pursuit of the unmediated chthonic power of dumb rural Ireland, and he seems to know that he will not get much more than wet clothes, sore feet, and the more-than-occasional encounter with armed officers and angry partisans. (That he will get a book out of it is almost unmentionable.) At the same time that he is taking an arduous hike, he is also flirting with disaster. Colm Tóibín has long shown himself to be expert at amusing himself with and in difficulties.

Tóibín writes of a land in which zealots have exercised a baleful control on civil life, and he is tacitly aware that zealotry is what it takes to survive the inhuman hardships of the native Irish experience of English dominion, which lingers on in the North because so many radical Protestants were transplanted there from the island across the Irish Sea (mostly from Scotland) in the troubled times of the early Seventeenth Century. What had been bad enough got much worse. By the Twentieth Century, it was hard to say what “Irish” might really mean. Was Oscar Wilde Irish? Certainly not in the way that James Joyce was. But Wilde and Shaw and Beckett looked Irish enough in London. In Bad Blood, Tóibín reports being shocked to see that some people from Omagh (a town in the North) have signed a guest book identifying themselves as “British.” That’s what the partition of the island has done: Protestant Northerners see themselves as Irish no longer.

When Bad Blood came out, in the mid-Eighties, I wouldn’t have touched it. I had a “rule” about Ireland and Israel: for literary purposes, they did not exist. I have held on to the rule as regards Israel, but it was Tóibín who changed my mind about Ireland. And he did so very craftily, with a wonderful novelization of the life of Henry James. I still can’t do justice to The Master, to Tóibín’s successful appropriation of the sensibility of a writer whose style he does not begin to attempt to emulate, capturing him not in the Master’s own densely-woven prose but instead in the persistent hesitancy that inspired it. James could never make up his mind to do anyting, so he devoted his art to writing about that, and to making it riveting. Almost all of his books (there are a few comic exceptions) creak with gothic anxiety — what was that? Who made that noise? The ghosts of bedtime stories, however, are replaced by self-interested, occasionally malevolent characters who are very much alive. What is the second half of The Golden Bowl but a prolonged dual haunting, with each of the women, Maggie and Charlotte, a noxious phantom in the other’s life? Neither can be quite certain of the other, and this uncertainty is what Tóibín lodged in his own novel.

Having loved one book by Colm Tóibín, I had to read another, and so it has gone until now, with only two titles remaining, one of which I am halfway through. (The other is his next book, Homage to Barcelona.) Earlier this year (I think it was), I read The Heather Blazing, Tóibín’s second novel, and immediately fell into the confusion of regarding it as his latest. I wished that I knew how to pronounce Gaelic, and thanked the Internet for help with “Fianna Fáil” and “Taoiseach.” I wish that Bad Blood came with a map, but I still have the Esso map of Ireland that I used to drive from Dublin to Limerick (my first time on the wrong side of the road, and I drive across a whole country!) in 1977. (The map is in very delicate shape, and it does not show Station Island.) Without ever having actually changed my mind about Ireland (beautiful, but something of a theme park), I have been an eager reader of whatever Colm Tóibín has to say about it.

There has been another Irishman, too, who, like Tóibín, has written a very fine (I think great) novel about New York: Joseph O’Neill. O’Neill, of course, is not just Irish. If anything, he makes the problem of deciding what “Irish” means exponentially more complicated than it already was. His mother belongs to a Syrian family living in southern Turkey, and he himself grew up primarily in The Hague, from which he went to university in England and then into the Temple, of all places.  But his paternal grandfather, as he tells in his superb family memoir, Blood Dark Track, was imprisoned for belonging to the IRA. Where is home? For Tóibín, it is Enniscorthy, a cathedral town in Wexford that often appears in his fiction.

Have they met, I wonder. They must have done. But it seems impossible, somehow.

***

Good grief! What I took to be the blister of an improperly healed incision turned out to be a squamous cell, ballooning from the back of my head. I’ll have it off in no time, but — lordy!  

What is it about waiting that reduces me to low wretchedness? I agree with Pascal that most of human misery could be forestalled if people were better able to sit quietly in a room, but sitting quietly in a room waiting for a knock or a telephone call that may or may not come at any minute is a rare and pure kind of misery in itself, all the more painful for lacking any kind of objective manifestation (broken bones, severed arteries, masked gunmen). And when the sitting quietly goes on for an entire day, beyond hope of knock or call, until about 5:30, when the repairman finally shows up, and spends the next hour and a half on the floor of my kitchen, muttering quite audibly about the difficulty of the job, only to stand up and announce that, although the new motor has been installed, there is “a little piece” that he’s having a hard time with, is afraid of breaking, so, I’m sorry, our chief tech guy will come tomorrow, if anybody’s home, and get the job done — actually, I was relieved to hear it. It didn’t bother me in the least that the dishwasher hadn’t, after all that, been repaired. The waiting was over!

The worst that can happen is never as bad as waiting for the worst that can happen.

I won’t be spending today sitting quietly. I told the repairman that I would have to be out of the house until three in the afternoon. That was not a problem, he said. (I have my doubts, of course, about his power to fix appointments for his superiors.) Ray Soleil is going to help me tidy up the last bit of balcony evacuation, and, after lunch, he’ll cover for me while I run to Fairway and Gristede’s.

***

While sitting quietly, I read the second half of Zadie Smith’s new novel, NW. The conditions were not conducive to full literary appreciation, but I read avidly, as fascinated as I could be by the unfolding of Natalie Blake, one of Smith’s quartet of principals, all children of a housing estate in Northwest London, three of them strivers of varying degrees of success. Natalie’s achievement is the most spectacular, but she knocks about emptily in it until she begins, as earnestly as any drug addict, to destroy herself.

170. In drag

Daughter drag. Sister drag. Mother drag. Wife drag. Court drag. Rich drag. Poor drag. Jamaican drag. Each required a different wardrobe. But when considering these various attitudes she struggled to think what would be the most authentic, or perhaps the least inauthentic.

Natalie (née Keisha) reminded me of a character from another one of this seasons new books, Ian McEwan’s Serena Frome, from Sweet Tooth. Serena comes from near the other end of the social scale; she is a bishop’s daughter; and she is nowhere near as driven to succeed as Natalie is. The two women aren’t alike at all, except that their top-drawer educations leave curious holes in their minds. Both are untouched by the humanism in which higher education used to be grounded. It is true that this humanism was soiled by an unthinking paternalistic sexism, a rather mindless division of humanity along anatomical lines. But that, I think, was an accident; it could have been torn away and discarded. Instead, humanism itself was discarded. Serena Frome, thanks to her maths major, was never properly taught how to read a serious novel, with the result that she was incapable, as an adult, of reading her own behavior. (Sweet Tooth is essentially a novel about novels, and as wonderful as anything out of The Arabian Nights.)

Natalie Blake is a more familiar failure-in-success. She has worked her way to the top of the legal profession without ever grappling with the problem of living in the legal profession — of inhabiting success. What happens when the challenges run out, when accomplishment is achieved? Zadie Smith is not really interested in this problem — the problem of fitting human aspiration to human limitations — but her novel does a better job of presenting the issue than today’s universities do.  

On Saturday night, after dinner, Kathleen remarked that she never heard anyone other than an infant addressed as “baby” until she was in her teens — what a proper upbringing! I knew that “baby” was not used by the nice people among whom I grew up, and was vaguely disturbed by the suggestion that a man who called his wife “baby” was still overtly in love with her (that is to say, adolescent). “Babe,” however, happened to be the nickname of one of my parents’ cocktail-circut friends. Like the famous batter, Babe Shea was a man; unlike him, a very tall one. I remember Babe Shea as looking something like Gregory Peck; he was certainly that nice. He and his wife, Hope, lived in an old stucco house a few streets away — just outside the Village but quite close to Siwanoy, the country club — that was notorious for its flooding basement. A sump pump had to be run at all times. This was regarded by my mother as a deep tragedy, worse than childlessness. A leaky foundation was something like untreated cancer, you’d have thought.

I had been looking for something in the afternoon, and the blue room was a tumult of ejecta from the closets. It so happened — I remembered, as we talked in the evening — that one pile of stuff was topped by two silver trays, the trays that I can’t use and can’t think what else to do with. One tray was presented to my parents when they moved from Bronxville to the Texas, in 1968. The other was given to my father on his sixitieth birthday, in 1974, by a new group of friends. Both trays are covered with engravings made from my parents’ friends signatures, surrounding (in each case) a big gothic “K.” I remembered, mentioning Babe Shea, that he and Hope were represented (in her hand, I’m sure) on the Bronxville tray. Sure enough.

My sister and I are the only people in the world who could possibly recognize any of the names on both trays. There are perhaps two hundred people at the most who would recognize most of the names on either — possibly far fewer. The Bronxville tray will be fifty years old in a few years, and, given the American penchant for moving about the country, the network that connected my parents and their friends has largely broken down. Someone for whom the names of Edna and Johnny Caesar might ring a bell would probably not have a clue about Jeanne and Matt Leckey. Already in 1968, there were two widows, Kay Schramm and June Black. (I’d gone to grade school with Kay’s son and June’s daughter; years later, I ran into the latter at a party, and learned that she had pursued a successful career as a hands model.) And the Clearys didn’t sign, because, dear as they were to my parents, they had perished ina plane crash thirteen years earlier.

The autographs on the Bronxville tray bring back most of the signers with great clarity, because I cannot really remember a time at which I was put to work, on New Year’s Eve, passing hors d’oeuvres to them in our living room. I was not much of a reader as a boy, but I remember Johnny Caesar very much as if he were a favorite character from a story book. (It’s no wonder that I’ve always been inclined to drink more than I ought.) Grace Byrnes, who with her husband had moved to Southern California before my parents went to Texas (we visited them once), did not sign the tray, but she comes to mind along with the people who did, because she was my idea of a fairy godmother, and I would bring her special plates until my mother put a stop to such foolishness. These were the characters who decorated my childhood. The tale is not one that I would pull down from the shelf and read, but the tray is like the spine of a thick book. I suppose that, for the tray to have any continued meaning after I’m gone, I should have to write out the text.

It would not make for hours of reading. A few of the names mean nothing even to me. And, aside from the fact that he worked for JC Penney, which nobody in Bronxville had ever heard of (at that time), I’ve already told you everything I know about Babe Shea.

Last night, Ray Soleil had dinner with us. This gave him not only a chance to catch up with Kathleen but a convenient departure time for the spiriting away of furniture through the lobby, a practice frowned upon during what, even though this is a residential building, we shall have to call business hours. The piece that Ray was taking — happily, he’s found a spot for it in someone else’s home — lost the game of musical chairs that ensued when the wicker armchair, a stout piece that was purchased for my use, surviving not only that but also several years exposed to the elements on the balcony and Kathleen’s favorite perch, was brought inside during the evacuation. When it decided to stay, some other chair had to go. Now that Ray has removed the loser, which was very much in the way for a week, we have our Feuerbach.

(Come on, how often am I going to get to say that?) 

My post-vacation Zen cool is in danger of fraying. The problem is the kitchen. Not the dishwasher, which still isn’t working. (A new motor has been ordered. When the price was quoted to me over the phone, I said, “Perfect!” There was nothing perfect about the price itself, which was pretty steep, but it was much lower than the cost of a new unit, which would also involve delivery, installation, and other inconveniences that would require me to confront the Cerberus in the basement.) Surprisingly, I still don’t mind washing the dishes myself. (I’m very suspicious of this equanimity.) But, what with the cascade of decisions that the clearing of the balcony unloosed, I haven’t had the time or the mental energy to keep the kitchen in shape. Every surface seems to be taken by something that, when I’m harriedly in the middle of something else, is “indispensable.”

What I would like to do is to put on a nice old movie — one of the Bournes, perhaps — and get to work. But I haven’t got a screen in the kitchen anymore. The all-in-one Toshiba, with its self-contained DVD player, was never entirely satisfactory because it would play only American discs, and I’m usually in the mood, in the kitchen, to watch something British. Then the sound went kaput. Even at the loudest volume setting, most dialogue came across as a whisper. I plugged in a pair of auxiliary speakers, but to no avail; all they added was massively distorted bass. So, in the orgy of disencumbrance that constituted the first phase of the balcony operation, I sent the unit off along with the other discards. (There’s probably some brilliant solution involving the iPad and Netflix. In fact, I know there is, because that’s how Will watches his favorite shows.)

Such are my woes: not very serious. I’m hoping that the rain will let up by this evening, so that I won’t have to get wet when it’s time for the Toots Thielemans celebration at TimeWarner Center.

***

The downside of getting a staggering amount of housework done is that it leaves you staggered. I think that I’m going to go out tonight not because I have the strength but because I’m too weak just to stay home. I’d fall apart. I remind myself that it is not necessary to be punctual for events at the Rose Theatre. Walk in anytime! The cool thing about jazz — and about our aisle seats.

An enormous bag full of antique comestibles went down the chute about ten minutes ago. (There was a tub of Greek olives that — ew!) Four shopping bags full of shopping bags were reduced to two. Is the obsessive accumulation of shopping bags a New York thing, or is it just that everyone in New York accumulates shopping bags, and not just prudential old ladies and general hoarders? I must have discarded thirty Crawford Doyle bags.

Looking around, I can breathe. The place looks normal again.

Is there anything more stultifying than paperwork? It’s not necessarily unpleasant or tedious — not necessarily. But it always puts a stop to the pleasing play of the mind upon all that is finest &c. The book that I’m reading, The War of the Austrian Succession, is a tad stultifying as well, with its reversals and general sense of endlessness. The battles are rarely intrinsically decisive — Hohenfriedberg was exceptional for having highly disproportionate losses among the Prussians (few) and the Austro-Saxons (many) — but instead often go to whomever holds the field at the end. (I give up: you win.) This is not the stuff of genuine victory, and no call for triumph. I learn something new in every chapter; for example, did you know that there were fourteen English colonies on the Atlantic Seaboard? Yes, and one of them, Nova Scotia, decided not to join in the Revolution, which is how we get our textbook thirteen. (It’s as if Nova Scotia went French.) Also: I had no idea, for all the reading that I’ve done about Mme de Pompadour, that the Marquis d’Argenson (not one of her chums) was so spectacularly fatuous. Incompetence doesn’t come into it. The man was a utopian noodle-head. In connection with his appointment as chief minister, Reed Browning calls Louis XV “the silliest of kings.” I bristle — but it can’t be denied. A charming man Louis may have been, but his grasp of kingship went no further than managing a family firm (and it didn’t help that half the family was in another country, Spain). In any case, I feel as stuffed with maneuvers as barrel of pork.

For some time now — six months? something like that — Kathleen’s day has become by coming into the living room for her tea and toast and Times and SAD lights. Last week, this new development was substantiated by the new table, which I tilt down every morning but which is tilted up, in the corner, every evening. Today, I added something else to the routine. When Kathleen was done with the newspaper, I opened my Museum calendar and ran through some coming events. We had a first look at the Paul Taylor schedule for March. She gave me the tea towels that she bought at Gracious Home yesterday morning, for me to send on to the owner of our Fire Island House. The towels are a thank-you gift in part, but what I really needed them for was to sweeten a box of thoroughly banal kitchen tools that I packed up by mistake. Nothing would look more rejected and nothing could be more dejecting, at least in my view. It’s terrible to open a package that contains nothing interesting! So: tea towels, carefully chosen by Kathleen to suit the owner’s colors. Now I can box everything up.

If I could go through the calendar at breakfast once a week, that would be a triumphant victory over the forces of inertia! And it’s a good thing that I finally got round to paperwork yesterday, too, because otherwise we’d have missed our first Jazz at Lincoln Center concert, tomorrow night: Toots Thielemans. Kathleen can’t wait. She is an aficianado of the mouth organ.

“Contemn” is a word that I often wish to use, but never dare. I was surprised to find it (although I oughtn’t to have been, given the richness of his vocabulary) in Reed Browning’s War of the Austrian Succession. Writing of Maria Theresa (at this time merely Queen of Hungary and Archduchess of Austria) that “she contemned British informality as fully as she distrusted British sensitivity to Austrian interests,” Browning puts some oomph in the old girl’s contempt. To contemn something is much stronger than having contempt for it.

But “contemn” sounds too much like “condemn,” even to the reading ear, not to sprout confusion. Back in the days when my vocabulary was growing so fast that I’d have had to take up residence in a dictionary if I were actually to look up all the new words that I encountered, I fancied for a while that “contemn” was an archaic spelling of the more familiar word. And the times that we live in do not favor the use of an active verb for an unpopular attitude. Reed Browning’s sentence tells us not only that Maria Theresa was disgusted by British manners but that she thought that she was right to do so: she regarded her contempt as salubrious and praiseworthy. We are inclined to see such unpleasant feelings as, at best, unhelpful.

Who is Reed Browning? I gather that he’s on the faculty at Kenyon College in Ohio. His style is ripe and somewhat Gibbonian, and no one at Oxbridge writes like that anymore. Of the final years of Cardinal Fleury’s long career, Browning writes,

But in his prime the cardinal had been a master game-player himself. What is significant here is that by 1742 Fleury was well past his prime, weary and failing. And so he ended up accepting, even endorsing, a military effort against Austria that addressed no definable French need. The judgment of historians has properly been severe: Cardinal Fleury lived too long for his good name.

That sort of capsule summation has gone quite out of fashion. So has Browning’s habit of shifting between individual figures (diplomats, generals, sovereigns) and the entities that they represent (Spain, Prussia, and so on). Truly up-to-date historians take pains not to attribute actions to abstractions.

But the War of the Austrian Succession — what could be more old-fashioned than that, even when it was being fought? For such a long war, there were very few battles. (Browning writes about battles as well as anyone I know.) Everyone seems to have lost the heart for the violence and destruction of warfare. The engagements that did occur were bloody enough, but you can sense the rising discomfort with loss of life (unimagined a thousand years earlier) that would steadily lead to our own humanitarian befuddlement about armed conflict. The armies and navies of the 1740s haunted each other but generally avoided engagement; men and materiel were too expensive to waste in grandstanding. You might almost say that they replaced kicking and shooting with dancing.

The war was launched when Frederick II (not “the Great” quite yet) invaded, occupied, and claimed Silesia, the territory of the upper Oder River valley, rich in coal and other ores, that would become the industrial heartland of Prussia. It is very much part of Poland today, but it forms a distinctive feature of maps of the Second and Third Reichs — it’s a finger, inserted between Poland and Moravia (now part of the Czech Republic), that sticks out in to the southeast, a peninsula of German dominion. It’s amazing that anyone lives there today, because the Nazis threw the Poles out and then the Poles threw the Germans out. Not to mention the death camps at Auschwitz and Birkenau. (As I said, the industrial heartland.) Frederick’s claim to Silesia was acknowledged by Austria in 1742, and that ought to have been that for him, but he re-entered what had by now become a wider war, with theatres in northern Italy and the Austian Netherlands (Belgium), in order to assure himself a place at the table when peace was eventually hammered out. That way, his claim to Silesia would be recognized by everyone.

Fashionable or not, Reed Browning writes my cup of history.

***

A cute wedding story: Will was one of two ringbearers at his uncle Brendon’s wedding on Saturday. The other ringbearer was even younger than Will, not quite two-and-a-half. It was decided, at the rehearsal, that each ringerbearer would be walked down the aisle by a flower girl (or junior bridesmaid), of whom there were two, aged seven or eight. At the wedding itself, however, the younger ringbearer’s mother decided, probably with reason, that she would walk her little boy down the aisle. As a result, Will followed, holding hands with both flower girls. I haven’t seen pictures yet, but I’m told that he quite liked this arrangement, news which comes as no surprise. He made his parents very proud, and we’re as proud of them.

Instead of getting down to work this morning, I thought that I should take a walk, and pay a visit to Carl Schurz Park at an unaccustomed hour. I would take advantage of the sun’s position to give a number of familiar views a different look. After crossing York Avenue, I got out the camera, to take a picture of a doorman hosing down the sidewalk — and learned, as I had just moments before feared, that I ought to have changed the battery before leaving the apartment. I retraced my steps without too much complaint and was in the Park about twenty minutes later than I should have been. I ran two errands on the walk home. Bushed by this modest exercise, I sank into my reading chair and devoured Nicholas Lemann’s thoughts about Mitt Romney. My blood ran cold as I remember Lemann’s prediction, made in the same pages (The New Yorker) twelve years ago at just about this point in the election cycle, that George W Bush would win in November. I scoured the new piece for any evidence of a similar forecast about his subject — happily, in vain. Then I made a grilled ham-and-cheese sandwich. Here I am.

***

Among the many interesting pieces in the current New York Review of Books that I wolfed down over the weekend, the one that kept me thinking was Jonathan Friedman’s commentary on Hedrick Smith’s Who Stole the American Dream?According to Friedman, Smith posits a conspiracy of economists, executives, lobbyists, and other persons of means as the force that steered the United States into its current backwater of income disparity (and associated political inequality), but does not actually demonstrate its existence. I myself am not inclined to believe in conspiracies — not where large numbers of participants and issues are concerned. There is no way that anyone could have planned the nation’s move toward rentier capitalism; what’s far more likely to have happened — and this is not inconsistent with Smith’s argument — is cascading opportunities that were launched by a few policy changes (in the deregulatory direction) were seized by hundreds if not thousands of businessmen, inspired by free-market economists and equipped with lobbyists who fed their successes back into the legislative loop. With a restored conservative judiciate (the norm in American history), property rights took preference over personal (humanitarian) rights, and the vicious cycle became steadily more vicious. There was no need for a conspiracy; opportunists responding to momentary conditions were far abler to effect the revolution. It helped that most of the Americans who did not take part in this overhaul also had (and have) little or no interest in business. These other Americans think not of business but of something that businessmen would rather not think about: jobs.

(The purest capitalist is the businessman who employs no one. This — and not industrial or any other kind of production — is the core principle of capitalism.)

Friedman says something else that’s very itchy.

(Moreover, Smith’s view that these and similar actions at many other companies were a way of systematically favoring shareholders over workers needs to confront the fact that, for American business as a whole, the past fifteen years have been a period of exceptionally poor retunrs on common stocks…)

No, it doesn’t! When wheelers and dealers talk of “shareholder value,” they really mean precisely the opposite: sharedumper value. Dividends are of no account; it’s flipping stocks that provides the payout. Private equity firms infest a company, saddle it with debt, prune its operations, and sell off what’s left to a bunch of suckers. That’s when they realize their “shareholder value.” As Joe Nocera puts it in today’s Times, “The candidate [Romney] and the nation’s richest share a fondness for capital gains.” Capital gains accrue when investments are liquidated, when stocks are sold. Sayonara time. Every time you see “shareholder value,” read “platinum parachute.”

***

A massive pile of ironing awaited. And awaited. It was massive in the middle of August, before I left for Fire Island. I grabbed the unpressed handkerchiefs and packed them for the month. The pile grew more massive upon return. The closet door would no longer close. We ran out of napkins.

Two books arrived today, the new Pankaj Mishra and the new Zadie Smith. I was sinking my teeth into the former when a pang of guilt ruined my appetite. I really ought not to be sitting reading. I ought to be ironing. I had, I estimated, just enough energy. For a treat, I would watch Miranda, the second season.

It was important to ascertain which episode is the “Are we?” episode. Stevie develops a tic of making her inquisitiveness even more annoying by tacking “are we?” onto every question. “Off to have lunch with Tamara, are we?” The climax comes when Stevie shows up at Gary’s restaurant in a rather youthful top and skirt, and Miranda has her revenge: “Mutton dressed as lamb, are we?” It’s Episode 10, and I won’t forget that in future because “Tamara” and “are we” have a sort of rhyme. Episode 10 ends with the appalling revelation that Gary married Tamara in Hong Kong (Episode 7), so that she could get a green card. I didn’t know that they had green cards in Britain — that their green cards are actually green. I wonder if that’s true. Anyway, it’s a true marriage of inconvenience. Plus you can go to jail, although that’s not what happens to Gary, thank heaven.

Kathleen wondered if there will be a third season of Miranda. I’m inclined to think that there needn’t be. Like the lovers on Keats’s grecian urn, Gary and Miranda will remain in their technically unconsummated relationship for all time. Miranda Hart will go on to something else (as indeed she already has done, with Call the Midwife). But it’s hard to imagine that any role will ever suit Patricia Hodge more deliciously.

Because I saw no videos — movies, TV, or anything else — while I was on my seaside vacation, it was such fun! to get back to the rudulent funbags of Miranda. And I was delivered of much ironing.