It seems, lately, that I always want to begin this page with a short list of the pages that haven’t been written — the ones that I promise to get round to. Right now, there are three derelictions — their subjects being a chamber recital, a Broadway show, and a novel. But who, besides me, gives a damn? I’m flattering myself with a guilty conscience.

I have caught up on the Friday Movies front, though: three weeks ago, I saw La Nana, a genial film from Chile. Two weeks ago, I didn’t go to the movies at all, but last Friday I saw the unhappily titled but otherwise marvelous The Men Who Stare at Goats.

We read Stephen King’s story in The New Yorker, and recalled of reading Stephen King in The New Yorker the first time that that happened. Publishing an assertively non-literary writer is one thing; treating the magazine as an ongoing pre-publication event for forthcoming books is another. And that’s what fiction at The New Yorker seems to be, lately, no matter who writes it.

If it weren’t for Liesl Schillinger, I just might give up on the Book Review review.

Regular readers will not be surprised to learn that we’re behind schedule this week, and that only two new pages have been added to Portico as of this writing: this week’s Book Review review and a word about Javier Marias’s intensely engaging (almost shoulder-grappling) story in the issue of The New Yorker that bears today’s date, “While the Women Are Sleeping.”

That we’re running late today is no surprise. The miracle is that we’re even crawling to the keyboard. And sitting upright!

We knew that there would come a point in the year when the Editor would have to cut back on posting. But we expected it to come in late November, not early October. We thought that the Editor could make it to his annual Thanksgiving holiday before he felt obliged to divert his attention from the virtual world (and relatively simple pleasure) to the real one (no comment). We were wrong.

The Editor was undone by a single act of upholstery. Moving one substantial piece of furniture in his small apartment tends to set off multiple chain reactions, producing entropic unsightliness. Personally, the Editor is trying very hard not to be the sort of person who tosses problems and projects into shopping bags which he then slides behind the couch with the self-satisfied air of having pulled something over. He has learned that he and he alone is the victim of these feints. He will almost certainly die trying to be better.

It wasn’t that he didn’t get round to writing things up. He did! Jonathan Lethem’s second New Yorker story this year, for example! (He didn’t have much to say.) He got to Elijah Wald’s How the Beatles Destroyed Rock ‘N’ Roll, a book that he really liked, before oblivion set in and a re-reading would have been required. He even wrote up a chamber concert of Mozart and Gubaidulina, the sort of thing that was generally beyond him last season! And, as always, the  Book Review review.

After last week’s derelictions, it feels good to catch up — to catch up almost, that is. The two pages that were due last Monday are up this morning, as two of the pages pages that are due today. There ought to be a third, but I didn’t go to the movies last week — that’s how focused on household management I’ve been.

First of all, last week’s movie, the sensational Mad-Men era look at a young girl’s life, Lone Scherfig’s An Education. I have yet to hear a whisper of dislike for this movie; so far, the only negative word — and I can’t remember where I heard it — came from a dummkopf who thought it was dumb to cast Rosamund Pike in a bimbo role. Hello? Who could have done a better job with “the Latins”?

That’s one overdue page. The other is a writeup of Tessa Hadley’s story in “last week’s” New Yorker (“The Godchildren“). Last week’s story, Julian Barnes’s “Complicity,” is also up. The more I looked at “Complicity,” the more I felt that I was supposed to look at it more.

Finally, this week’s Book Review review.

There really ought to be a third new page, now I think of it; I still haven’t written up the music part of Friday’s MMArtists recital at the Museum. I could write a few paragraphs about why. More anon!

In addition to being the Editor of this Web site, I am also the chief cook and bottle-washer in a modest household on the Upper East Side of Manhattan (not shown). Every once in a while — much less often than once a year — household matters require my undivided attention for much of the day. This is such a time. I shall be posting daily, never fear, but lightly. Regular postings will resume next week.

All that I’ve got ready this morning is the Book Review review. I do hope to complete a page about An Education later today — but don’t wait for that! Run out and see the movie right now. Drop everything and just do it! (And forgive my hectoring tone; I’m in no mood for (today’s fun) mucking about in the storage unit.)

We spent a great deal of last week reading — and not writing. That’s our excuse, and we’re sticking with it. Of this week’s three new Portico pages, George Saunders’s “Victory Lap,” this week’s New Yorker story, is the first. We liked the story very much, but we’re glad that we don’t live in its part of the world.

 Which seems right next door to the setting of The Invention of Lying, a gentle comedy that will probably offend earnestly religious people. We wish that people in this movie’s part of the world really did regard churches as “quiet places for thinking about the Man in the Sky” — and no more.

Finally, this week’s Book Review review. We were glad that we’d already two of the books under review, or our wish list would be that much impossibly longer. Neil Sheehan’s Fiery Peace in a Cold War looks like a worthy sequel to Richard Rhodes’s The Making of the Atomic Bomb.

An advance copy of The Man Who Loved Books Too Much, by Allison Hoover Bartlett, was sent to the editor by a publicist. It was perhaps the fifth book that he has received in that way since we began keeping The Daily Blague — and it was easily the tenth offer. He tries not to ask for books that he won’t like, not because he feels obliged to publicists but because he doesn’t see the sense in writing more than a few lines about things that he doesn’t like. Happily, he was not wrong about The Man Who Loved Books Too Much. As a rule, we steer clear of books about books, but Allison Hoover Bartlett’s adventures with a non-violent sociopath make for a tale that we found both arresting and very funny.

We thought about the “no bad reviews” thing all last week, as thousands cheered (or so it seemed) for Deborah Eisenberg, new winner of a McArthur grant. We don’t begrudge Ms Eisenberg the prize — except perhaps her popularity with many people who matter, which depresses us.

The editor sat down to write about “Temporary,” the New Yorker story by Marisa Silver, with indistinct admiration but some uncertainty about what to make of the ending. As he wrote, however, focusing on the title, everything fell into place, especially the ending. There are people who believe that you ought to write about what you know. We believe that you ought to write about what you want to know. Not that big a difference, really.

The page on Guillermo Arriaga’s The Burning Plain  fulfills the “more anon” promises made in this Dear Diary entry, posted last Thursday. This week’s Home Theatre choice (Peter Webber’s Girl With a Pearl Earring) was motivated, of course, by the Milkmaid show at the Museum.

Finally — the only page that was not completed on Friday — this week’s Book Review review.

Now, Michael Gross’s Rogues’ Gallery is not my kind of book at all, and I knew that it wouldn’t be; but I read it because of its nominal subject matter, the making of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I’m sure that readers who have liked the book would not have wanted Mr Gross to say any more about art (as in “pleasures of”) than he has done.   

This week’s New Yorker story, “Land of the Living,” by Sam Shepard, would be a heartbreaker if it hadn’t been for a distracting odd couple that seemed to appear in every scene. What were they about?

On Friday, we saw Steven Soderbergh’s new movie, The Informant! , starring Matt Damon in top form. We did not come away pining for the bucolic pleasures of Decatur, Illinois. How do they manage, out there, amidst all that corn? No wonder Mark Whitacre embezzled millions.

Finally, this week’s Book Review review. One of the shortest ever.

New at Portico: Last week, we finished a very meaty and thought-provoking book of American history, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920, by Jackson Lears. Among other things, Rebirth is a meditation on the noxious potential of “good ideas.”

As the historian Richard Slotkin has brilliantly shown, since the early colonial era a faith in regeneration through violence underlay the mythos of the American frontier. With the closing of the frontier (announced by the US census in 1890), violence turned outward, toward empire. But there was more going on than the refashioning of frontier myth0logy. American longings for renewal continued to be shaped by persistent evangelical traditions, and overshadowed by the shattering experience of the Civil War. American seekers merged Protestant dreams of spirtual rebirth with secular projects of purification — cleansing the body politic os secessionist treason during the war and political corruption afterward, reasserting elite power against restive farmers and workers, taming capital in the name of the public good, reviving individual and national vitality by banning the use of alcohol, granting women the right to vote, disenfranchising African-Americans, restricting the flow of immigrants, and acquiring an overseas empire.

The must-read book in this week’s Book Review is The Hawk and the Dove, Nicholas Thompson’s book about his grandfather, Paul Nitze’s, and Nitze’s colleague and sparring partner, George Kennan. But the must-read review is Leon Wieseltier’s estocada of Norman Podhoretz’s cranky new book. For a link, turn to the Book Review review.

This week’s New Yorker story, “The Lower River,” poses all the usual needling challenges that we have come to expect from Paul Theroux, whom, even though you didn’t ask, we want you to know that we think of as one of the unhappiest writers ever to draw a breath. Perhaps the unhappiness is reserved for the writing. “The Lower River” is a good story withal, and we recommend reading it.

This week, we went to see Mike Judge’s Extract, and we’d like to share a little souvenir of the film that we nicked from IMDb. Until you’ve seen Extract, you may think that this photo of Dustin Milligan is a slice of light beefcake, but afterward, if you file the image away as “How to Clean a Pool,” it’ll make you giggle.

New at Portico: On Thursday night — knowing that I’d be involved with moving furniture on Friday morning — I went across the street to the movies, and saw Inglourious Basterds. I was very uncertain about what to expect. Although I liked Jackie Browne, there was something about Pulp Fiction that I disliked very deeply, and I never saw either of the Kill Bills. The new movie, however, is hugely fun. Setting the film in Forties Paris instead of Nineties Los Angeles has a lot to do with it. The sad fact is that, washboards notwithstanding, people used to look a lot better.

The week’s New Yorker story is by Orhan Pamuk, and it made me wish that I could read it in Turkish. As languages go, Turkish is like Japanese — very different from English. (Chinese is practically a member of the same linguistic family, by comparison). Maureen Freely, whose father taught at Robert College, Turkey’s most prestigious institution of higher learning, and who therefore grew up speaking Turkish as well as English (and, on the evidence, a rich, literate Turkish to boot), continues to serve as the writer’s alter ego. I read the other day, at Marginal Revolution, that Mr Pamuk’s new book, The Museum of Innocents, has already appeared in German. What’s with that? Is it the generation of Turkish-ancestry Germans who don’t really understand their parents’ language?

The Book Review was very brief this week. Perhaps our rentrée littéraire will pick up next week. Perhaps the cool weather will catalyse the wholly new approach to book reviewing that the Book Review so desperately needs. Does anyone under forty read it, except for professional reasons?

This week’s book, rather cursorily dealt with, is Niall Ferguson’s objectionally usefull history of finance, The Ascent of Money. If it were not against all the commandments of my religion (every single one of them, except for the one banning sex with unequals), I would watch the TV version of the book, just to gloat over its flashy thinness. As it is, I can barely contain the horrified glee that Harvard’s hiring of such a media-savvy professor occasions. As for the book, it’s something that, for all of its problems and drawbacks, ought to be read by every intelligent person.

At Portico, this week’s book page, a write-up of Russell Shorto’s The Island at the Center of the World. makes us want to show Peter Stuyvesant and his persistent antagonist, Adriaen van der Donck, this picture of the East River, just a few hundred years later. And what’s a few hundred years? Not one of the buildings clearly visible on the left bank of the river was standing even fifty years ago. And, who knows? It may become — “it” being what’s currently called Roosevelt Island — it may become the “island at the center of the world” someday. Probably not — but if you’re in the business of making cool predictions, you never say never.

Writing about Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock, I could hardly stop thinking about Tony Goldwyn’s lovely 1999 release, A Walk on the Moon. So many parallels! The Catskills! Woodstock! The moon landing! Wordly actresses pretending to be old shmattatrixes! Liev Schreiber (even)! These parallels, however, only intensify one’s sense of the difference between the two films. And I hope I won’t be thought to play favorites when I say that Taking Woodstock has no Diane Lane character.

There is no Diane Lane character in The Big Tease, this week’s Home Theatre piece (and another movie from ten years ago), either. But we know that, at an earlier stage in her career — had there been one — Ms Lane would have been super in the Mary McCormack role. If only Diane Lane had spent four or five years as in supporting roles! The price of fame &c.

This week’s New Yorker story was Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s “The Fountain House.” We didn’t really cotton to it, especially when we learned that the Fountain House in St Petersburg — the Fontanny Dom — is a shrine to the poet Anna Akhmatova. Ms Petrushevskaya’s story is set in Moscow, and is about folk tales, not poetry (there’s a difference). We’re beginning to think that The New Yorker needs a scholarly apparatus department.

Speaking of apartments, we found that we’d written up a story from way back in the spring, Jonathan Lethem’s “Ava’s Apartment,” and forgotten about it. That was then. Further Oblivion Dividends are unlikely.

Last and least &c (a relatively literate issue, though!), the Book Review review.

 New at Portico: It’s nothing short of miraculous, to us at least, that the week’s heat and humidity did not impair our productivity. But perhaps the dreadful climate explains why we can’t be bothered to put it any better than that.

¶ It took a while for us to warm to Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor, and, when we did, the pleasure of reading the book was somewhat clouded by that sense that the author isn’t yet old enough to do justice to his adolescence. He does capture the black-hole solipsism of the fifteen year-old male — and that’s it. That’s it? A great deal of very rich material, including the struggles of a difficult but committed marriage, goes underdeveloped. Happily, there is no law against returning to harvested fields.

¶ Our initial response to Dave Eggers’s “Max at Sea,” in last week’s New Yorker, was straight agony. Trying to read what turned out to be a children’s story as fiction for adults tied us up in knots. That The New Yorker would ever publish a children’s story as “fiction” was a conclusion that we should never have trusted our own intelligence to reach. The experience prompted a good deal of thought about the importance of “getting it,” as though literature were primarily a puzzle to be decoded. This was a case of not “getting” something that wasn’t worth the effort.

¶ More in the spirit of a hot August week, we went to see The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard, a joyously terrible movie. We  hope that the movie is not a really big hit, because that will only encourage a raft of miserably inferior imitations. On the home theatre front, we watched Fred and Ginger  in Follow the Fleet without interruption. We even took notes, but they turned out to be useless, at least as copy.

¶ As for this week’s Book Review review, are we the only one to find Geoffrey Grandfield’s witty drawing more than a little unpleasant, given the context? It’s nothing less than perverse of the Times to fuss over avoiding everyday demotic in print while publishing such unseemly illustrations.

New at Portico:  This week’s book, Walter Kirn’s Lost in the Meritocracy, probably ought not to be as entertaining as it is. On the last page, the author makes a lamentably post-graduate discovery: reading Twain and Dickens for pleasure. What he learned at Princeton can only be called bullshit. The book is horrifying evidence that we in America suffered a Cultural Revolution of our own.

On Friday, I saw Funny People, and I loved it. But it’s extremely unusual nature is somewhat concealed by its romper-room cast. Will this be the picture that makes audiences tell Judd Apatow that they preferred his “earlier, funnier” movies?

In addition to going to the movies every Friday morning (more or less), we’re going to take a good look at DVDs in our home library, also on a weekly basis. It just so happens that we begin with Allen Coulter’s Hollywoodland, a movie that we’ve come to like very much since it came out three years ago.

As for the Book Review review, we can’t remember an issue stuffed so full of cranky, unhelpful reviews of new fiction.

It’s may be too early to tell (we’re awfully credulous about “jokes”), but the Manhattan Airport Foundation’s plan to transform Central Park into an international airport, which raised blood pressures all over the Blogosphere last week, is probably a hoax.

A video that seemed to capture everyone’s fancy was “Jill and Kevin’s Big Day.” We confess to shedding copious tears of happiness for the young couple, but then what we saw was a bridal party that was celebrating a marriage. Some viewers saw a crudely amateur performance. The dissonance between these views can disturb any wedding that’s at all out of the way, but probably only in the developed West, where a large corps of professionally-trained performers sets a very hight standard for — hoofing.

New at Portico: This week’s Book Review review. Yes! We took care of it yesterday, in about an hour. Back in 2005, when the feature was introduced, it took about eight hours to prepare, which is why we stopped trying to get it out on Sunday.

Whatever you do, be sure to click through to David Orr’s essay, “The Great(ness) Game,” in this week’s issue. It offers what I feel is a long-overdue explanation of the shift, in American poetry, away from the “great literature” canons of verse and the antic hiving of today’s poetry scene. What’s needed is not so much a change in the way poetry is written — that will always see to itself — as a change in the way it is written about in publications such as the Book Review. All too often, poetry is reviewed by and for other poets. This kind of professional backscratching (which makes TLS just about useless) has no place on the general reader’s reading table.

On this week’s cover: Liaquat Ahamed’s book about the central bankers who made the Great Depression a lot harder than it had to be has certainly appeared in a timely way, and Times financial writer Joe Nocera gives it a lucid, favorable review.

Running around doing errands yesterday, I managed to lose the Book Review somewhere. Once upon a time, this would have been a catastrophe, but, for some time now, I’ve been working from the newspaper’s online site, not from the print edition. There were a few reviews that I hadn’t read before I sat down to work, but I found that I rather liked reading them online. On top of everything else, the Book Review is not the best-printed publication in the world.

Having played around in recent weeks with new classification systems, with cute (and ugly) color-coding, I found myself absolutely unwilling, yesterday, to continue such nonsense. That’s the scary part — all that categorization seemed foolish and unnecessary. It might be a sign that I’m about to stop reviewing the Book Review.

I took the day off, to read Christian Jungersen’s The Exception. If you can imagine a thriller set in the office of a human-rights organization – but you can’t, not at least until you read this amazing novel. Marcel Theroux gave it a boost two weeks ago in the Book Review, and as you can see I couldn’t wait to read it. As for writing it up, that’ll be ticklish. Thrillers can difficult to cover.

Happily, there’s nothing so exciting in this week’s issue.

¶ The Boy Next Door.