Not much change since last week, naturally, given the holiday. When I was young, the holidays were a great time for reading, but in those days I was strictly on the receiving end of all the goodies. Now I’ve got to cook them myself &c.

Aside from The Sportswriter, which I seem to read in odd hours while Kathleen naps, I’ve begun a few other titles, including The Father of All Things, by Tom Bissell. What was the first book that I read about Viet Nam, I wonder. It must have been Frances Fitzgerald’s Fire in the Lake. I was very absorbed by the I Ching at the time, and knew all the trigrams by sight. I used to “throw” the hexagrams with Tinkertoy rods, yarrow being not only unavailable but unknown to me. (I would grow it in my garden years later, as achillea.)

What I’m really working on, though, is The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, the Hercule Poirot mystery that made Agatha Christie famous in 1926. Appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, this is homework: I’m preparing to read Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?, by Pierre Bayard. I’m hoping that the latter will prove to be as cheeky as How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read.

As for this week’s Book Review,

A very inadequate zoom shot of the top of York Avenue, with Harlem a blur in the distance.

There Goes My Everything, Jason Sokol’s study of the white response to the struggle for civil rights, appears at a time when I find myself coming round to the view that struggle for equal civil rights for black Americans fractured the United States at least as badly as many white supremacists feared that it would — in what turns out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. For a long time, as the dust seemed to settle, I stupidly wondered if the movement had been a success. A sense that its achievement was not altogether complete eventually gave way to a recognition that it was merely the opening assault in a war against patriarchy that the most fierce abolitionists may have been unwilling to undertake. “What Is Wrong With America Today”? The America that everybody professes to love and root for is as defunct as Colonial Williamsburg — and we all know it. We had better get to work on breathing some life into its successor.

¶ There Goes My Everything.

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The Brearley School Playground

It is only in the past few weeks that I have seen schoolgirls on the absurd platform that used to do full duty as the Brearley School playground. (Now there’s a fieldhouse, quite close to my house, that’s shared by a handful of Upper East Side “ladies’ seminaries”). I really thought that the thing had been taken out of use.  What with all the ambiguous netting underneath, the structure does have a desperate air.

For some reason, I always took the playground to be a square, but it’s not — it’s really long enough to make a field for games. Little girls’ games, anyway. Every time I glance up at the youngsters, though, what I see is “recess” - variations on hanging out. Except that “hanging out” isn’t something that little girls do, is it? They’re not quite so brachiopod-ish.

These girls, anyway, are on the inside track to the top of the tree, if I may be permitted a fearfully mixed metaphor. How many of them will still live in New York when they grow up. And where in New York? On the Upper East Side, like the majority of their parents? And where will they shop? Where will anybody shop?

¶ The End of Retail Refinement.

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In the spirit of the season, I’ve cheated like mad. Two books that I’ve been reading for so long that even you’ve gotten sick of them — referred to for weeks now as “Blanning and Pamuk” — have been withdrawn from the pile, because I’ve almost finished reading them. I shall certainly read nothing else until I do finish them. Which means, more or less, that I’ve just taken a snapshot of books that I’m not reading.

Not yet. Not yet officially. (I am well into The Sportswriter.)

I’ve almost finished listening to What Is the What, but there, for some reason, my conscience intervenes. The book stays until the seventeenth disc plays. (Or is at least inserted into the Discman.)

There are four new titles. One of them is a promotion: Maugham’s The Painted Veil. This is the third of three minor novels that I know to have been turned into major motion pictures, and if the other two — Theatre (Being Julia) and Up at the Villa — are any indication, the novel will probably turn out to be a good deal more pallid than the movie. It’s just like cuisine, really; we demand more interest today. It’s almost arresting that Maugham should be providing Hollywood with such fertile armatures.

The other three are Crazy for God, Under a Cruel Star, and Blogging Heroes. More about these titles anon.

As for this weeks Book Review:

¶ A Stranger in Camelot.

Pierre Bayard’s book sounds, at least from the title, like a cute gimmick, but it turns out to be a deep book, one that, if you read it quietly, will change your idea of what it means “to read a book” — and demonstrate the large roles played by imagination and oblivion in “remembering” what you’ve read.  It’s fancy and it’s French, but it is as lucid and readily comprehensible as a Stop sign.

As in, “Stop worrying about all those books you haven’t read!”  

¶ How to Talk About You Haven’t Read.

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Now look: the pile thickened. I plodded on but finished nothing this week. I am about to be done, however, with Jason Sokol’s There Goes My Everything, which I plucked from another pile on Sunday, my big reading day. It’s an important book, and I felt rather ashamed of having taken so long to get through it. (I found it slow going but rewarding.) So that book appears in the pile for the purposes of this photograph only. I’m moving along with Pamuk and Blanning, the former dense and all-encompassing, the latter serious but witty. I will be done with one or both of these books by next week. (Kathleen scolds me for talking about “getting rid” of books I’m reading, as if I didn’t really enjoy them. I do enjoy them! But I hate the piles stacked up behind them!) As a sign of the general unfairness of things, John Fowles Daniel Martin, which I’ve already read at least twice, went straight from the bookseller’s wrapper into the pile: I’ve been keen to re-read it ever since walking through the tall grass in St Croix.

I shall be done with What Is the What soon, too. It is the Odyssey of our times — and maybe even another Odyssey. As for this week’s Book Review:

¶ The Ten Best Books of 2007.

A friend tipped me off to a novel that is both moving and dishy, a Cuban spin on the Cinderella story. (All right, Cuban-American.) Eduardo Santiago’s three “sisters” are so gracefully complete that Tomorrow They Will Kiss offers the easy pleasures of a snack but without the empty calories. This book’s calories are stacked.

¶ Tomorrow They Will Kiss.

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For me, the most memorable moment in the original Poseidon Adventure that does not involve explosions, inundations, or other forms of mayhem is the one in which Reverend Scott (Gene Hackman) confronts the ship’s doctor. The doctor is leading a large group of survivors toward the bow of the ship, because in his view this is the way to safety. The fact that the bow is manifestly in deeper water than the stern means little to this visibly shell-shocked authority figure, and nothing that the reverend can say (or, more characteristically, shout) can dissuade him from his doomed course. He rejects the reverend’s goal (the engine room) out of hand.

Now that the subprime mortgage tsunami has left Wall Street wondering which way is up, the Reverend Scotts of this world – among them, the new president of Malawi, Bingu wa Mutharika — are looking less contrarian. But I fear that we still have a long way to go before we emerge from the Erector Set phase of free-market economic theory.

¶ Celia W Dugger on Malawi and the Free Market, in the New York Times.  

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In the course of writing up Pierre Bayard’s How to Read Books You Haven’t Read, I needed (by my own lights) to check out a quotation from Montaigne. I can’t speak for the original, but the English translation offers extremely rudimentary annotation. The citations of Montaigne refer to Donald Frame’s mid-century translation, giving only the book’s title and a page number. The name of the essay in question would have been helpful. Although Frame’s translation has been revived for the Everyman’s Library edition, the pagination is evidently quite different. It took a while to discover that the essay that I wanted was one of Montaigne’s longest, “On Presumption.”

It was really quite shaming. Why don’t I know Montaigne – know him? Every time I open the Essays, I’m struck by his wise and sympathetic character. When he does not remind me of myself — “I flee command, obligation, and constraint. What I do easily and naturally, I can no longer do if I order myself to do it by strict and express command.” — he makes his very flaws sound charming — “Of music, either vocal for which my voice is very inept, or instrumental, they never succeeded in teaching me anything.” His decent skepticism, and his insistence that the habit of putting himself at the center of Creation is a helpless vice that he bitterly regrets, mark him as astonishingly modern, far more up-to-date and congenial than men born hundreds of years later.  Even the peripatetic and unpredictable course of his discussions, innocent as they are of the rigors of Cartesian symmetry, breathes the free-for-all air of open possibility that our jaded sensibilities crave. Montaigne is by far the most ancient “authority” cited in M Bayard’s book.

As I lamented the disappointments of my own education, I read about Montaigne’s —

I gladly return to the subject of the ineptitude of our education. Its goal has been to make us not good or wise, but learned; it has attained this goal. It has not tuahgt us to follow and embrace virtue and wisdom, but has imprinted in us their derivation and etymology. We know how to decline virtue, if we cannot love it. If we do not know what wisdom is by practice and experience, we know it by jargon and by rote. With our neighbors, we are not content to know their family, their kindred, and their connections; we want to have them as friends and form some association and understanding with them. Education has taught us the definitions, divisions, and partitions of virtue, like the surnames and branches of a genealogy, without any further concern to form between us and virtue any familiar relationship and intimate acquaintance. It has chosen for our instruction not the books that have the soundest and truest opinions, but those that speak the best Greek and Latin; and amid its beautiful words, it has poured into our minds the most inane humors of antiquity.

— and it occurred to me that nothing could better complement the freshman art-history survey that used to be (and still is, I hope) the covert foundation of every student’s education in the humanities than a year (in two semesters) spent reading Montaigne. Nothing but Montaigne! Nothing but Montaigne, that is, and all the classical authors to which his Essays offer so inviting an introduction. The entire education, in other words, of a first-class Renaissance mind.

Montaigne isn’t much taught in English. Everybody gets an essay or two in the course of discovering essays (again, I hope that I speak for the present as well as the past), but the selection is necessarily narrowed to Montaigne at his most rational and least personal. And the focus of such lessons is always on the clarity of exposition; the essays are held up, after all, as models for students, not as personal reflections. Certainly Montaigne is not the backbone of liberal-arts education that he ought to be.

A year of Montaigne might be very boring for poor freshmen, but the stuff would almost certainly stick with them until better times.

Assiduous readers will notice that two books have disappeared from the pile. That’s because I’ve read them.* I was tempted to replace them with books from the supplemental piles elsewhere, but the shorter stack was so pleasing that I decided to leave it alone. Besides, it’s not my only “what I’m reading” pile. I’ve got another one, comprising six books that I march through for an hour every morning. That’s all I’ll say about the “morning reading” project at this time.

I did slip in Michael Ruhlman’s The Elements of Cooking (the grey spine third from the bottom). This is not a book to read, but a culinary reference. Why did I buy it? I’ve no idea.  Someone must have been singing its praises. Looking through it, I don’t see very much that I don’t already know, or that isn’t likely to be in Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking. It’s a perfectly nice book, handsomely laid out and well-written. Maybe you can tell me why I have it. I’ve put it in the pile so that I’ll have to give a thorough once-over in order to remove it from the pile – and hence from my conscience.

Not only did I remove the stack of CDs, shown in last week’s photo, but I filed them all where they belonged. Now I really can’t find them. (Does anyone else out there have Night Song, that super, one-off, Michael Brook-produced CD by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan?)

¶ Holiday Books.

* But what does this mean? Bet you didn’t think that there was anything complicated about “reading a book.” Ha! If you don’t want to be branded as a clueless sniveling Anglophone, stay tuned for our account of Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read – the title of which, in the original French, is a question.

Le café chez nous.

Before we get to today’s book, I’d like to thank George Snyder, the author of 1904: The Year Everything Important Happened, for stopping by on a busy trip to New York. We met over a pot of coffee at my place, and I think I may say that we found an immediate rapport, discussing together some of the things that both of us talk about online. Then we marveled at the technology that, without our having to think about it very much, discovered us to one another. 

Colin Wells’s book about the impact of Byzantium upon the rest of the world has one of those impossible subtitles that promises romance or staggering accomplishment, but it delivers an impressive amount of information in a small space. I was very grateful to have been tipped off to it by another friend named George.  

¶ Sailing From Byzantium.

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Although I have no doubt that history will regard the Bush Administration as willfully, consciously, and even self-righteously lawless, I’m sometimes afraid that we will emerge from the nightmare (assuming that we do) without having learned very much what it means to be lawful. Only a very naive observer expects a sovereign executive to “follow the law” as a matter of course. Executives are not only forced to interpret the law at every turn, but they are also in sole possession of information about national affairs that necessarily colors their interpretations. Regardless of presidential devotion to the Constitution, the attempt to legislate the executive’s course of behavior will always be met with structural resistance,

Two weeks ago, I wrote about the impact of Vietnam upon my Boomer generation. This week, I’m reminded of a similar vintage, the unpopularity of Richard Nixon. Of all modern presidents, none is more likely to be judged in psychopathological terms: the man wasn’t “bad” so much as he was “sick.” The feeling that he had acted incompetently – not foolishly so much as beyond his powers – led Congress to try to clarify the margins of executive authority. One might as well, I fear, legislate the path of a particle in a cyclotron. Presidential authority is largely beyond our control because we want it to be.

This isn’t kindergarten. Changing the rules is never as simple or attractive as disregarding them. I think that we need a more grown-up understanding of what we expect from the law.

¶ David Cole on Jack Goldsmith, in the New York Review of Books.

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What am I reading? I haven’t got a clue. I certainly haven’t read anything in the past couple of days, which have been given over to housework and running errands. It was in the process of clearing off a shelf of back issues of Granta that I came across Richard Ford’s 1992 novella, The Womanizer, which I did read the other night, in one sitting, before, fearfully wakeful, going to bed resolved to think about nothing else until I fell asleep (a stunt that, amazingly, worked). I am still plowing through the same old pile: Blanning on Europe, Lilla on God and the West, and Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book, which is indeed, as Maureen Freeley writes in the afterword to her translation, the “cauldron” from which his later work comes.

As for this week’s Book Review:

¶ Sir Noël’s Epistles.

There’s an interesting story behind my reading this book, but I’m not sure that I ought to tell it. I has something to do with my Book Review reviews, which in several cases have elicited emails from authors. Only once, so far, however, have I been contacted by a reviewer. Which is both a surprise and not a surprise. After all, I don’t go after books and their authors; I go after reviewers who don’t do their job. But in the end the authors have more reason to follow up than reviewers do. I might actually buy a book; I’ve already paid for the review.

In any case, I wish it happened more often.

¶ Chang and Eng.

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Packing for St Croix, I took along a few more books than I could ever read – but only a few. I see now that I might have made do with only three: Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book, which has at last captured my interest; Sailing From Byzantium, Colin Wells’s robust (not to say vulgar) account of the influence of the Eastern Empire upon the West, upon Islam, and upon the Slavic world; and Agatha Christie’s Murder at the Vicarage. Because I’m so familiar with the Joan Hickson adaptation of Christie’s chestnut that I don’t have to fret over clues, the book is quite a pleasure to read.

I did bring one of the MacMullen books mentioned last week, but I doubt that I’ll get to it. Ditto, I’m afraid, Tony Attwood’s Asperger’s book.

¶ Woody Talks.

Here’s a book that, I guarantee, will make you sit up. Here is a book that will reveal the secrets of your innermost psyche. All right, maybe not yours, but at least that of most Americans. On occasion, most of the French. Even a bit of the English and the Germans. What does everybody really feel about stuff? What do you look for in a car? In a cheeseburger? In a caravanserial interlocutor*?

This quick read will tell you.

¶ The Culture Code.

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Clotaire Rapaille writes about “culture codes” with an enthusiasm that is almost always tempered by diplomacy: in the world of marketing, it does not pay to treat anyone with disrespect. There is one heartfelt lapse, however, a cri de coeur that will not endear the author to his (former) countrymen.

I was born in France, but like everyone else in the world, I had no choice of homeland. From the time I was very young, I knew that parts of the French culture failed to fit me properly. The French are extremely critical, they are pessimistic, they are jealous of what others have, and they put little value on personal success. When I told people there that I wanted to build a large business based on new ideas, they sneered and called me a megalomaniac.

The American culture seemed to offer so many of the things I wanted from life, especially in building a career. When I decided to emigrate, François Mitterand was president of France and he’d frozen the assets of any French citizen leaving the country. Therefore, when i went to New York, I had no money. I also had no place to live and my English was very poor. I’d come to America to do work on archetypes, and few people had any idea what I was even talking about.

I knew a few French immigrants in New York and I went to see them as soon as I arrived. They welcomed me, offering me a place to stay, some money, and the use of a car. When I told them about what I planned to do for a living, they encouraged me and told me they were sure I would succeed. As happy as I was to hear these words, the first thought that came to mind was “Are you sure you’re French?” These people, who’d been living in America for a few years, were utterly different from the French I knew in France. They were optimistic, helpful, generous, and enthusiastic about new opportunities. In other words, they were American. Yes, they’d embraced the American culture, but in addition, like me, they had many of these traits already and came here because they knew they would be surrounded by like-minded people. The French who were lazy and lacked imagination stayed in Europe. The ones with guts and determination came here. These people found “home” by moving elsewhere. Their homeland was an accident of birth; they found a permanent place to live when they left it to come to America.

Although I’m not lazy and don’t lack determination, I’m willing to give the French way a try, if it gets me a nice flat in the Seizième.

* Someone you pick up at a bar.

On the cover of the current issue of The Atlantic, there’s one of those great big portraits that’s composed of many much smaller images – except it isn’t; it just looks like one. In fact, it is an image of Barack Obama superimposed on a scrim of many much smaller images. Don’t ask me what they were thinking at the magaine, but the result suggests that they couldn’t be bothered to do it. And the headline – “Why Obama Matters – is even more wearisome. “Oh, that Atlantic,” I muttered to myself as I brought up the mail.

But although Andrew Sullivan can be shocking and even offensive, he is still a long way from boring or predictable. And his idea about Mr Obama is well worth mulling over.

¶ Andrew Sullivan on Barack Obama, in The Atlantic.

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From Lost and Found New York.

Ever since I began reading The New Yorker, I’ve been a big fan of James Stevenson. His lightly crazed lines have always seemed to conceal secrets: if I looked hard enough, I would understand everything. And, in a sense, I jave I’ve learned that the world is full of unforeseen cracks. That it falls apart, gently, when no one is looking. Even when Mr Stevenson was sketching suburban predicaments for the magazine, his drawings betrayed a fascination with ruin (rephrased as mild dilapidation). More recently, he has contributed a series of full-page narrative illustrations about Old New York to the New York Times. Floyd Bennett Field. The old Hudson River Day Liners. The Gowanus Canal – still with us. Whenever I came across one, I’d clip it and stash it with all the other (unread, stuffed-in-boxes) clippings.

The other day, I sorted through the clippings, throwing away most of them, and wondered, “When is Stevenson going to collect these drawings in a book?” Voilà. No sooner was the question asked than it was answered – even if it took me a day or two to find that out. On the lookout for something different to give to Miss G on her birthday, what do I see in the window of Crawford Doyle Booksellers but Lost and Found New York: Oddballs, Heroes, Heartbreakers, Scoundrels, Thugs, Mayors, and Mysteries, written and illustrated by – James Stevenson. I bought two copies.

It’s a big book, but not a thick one. The illustrations have been spread out a bit, and a number of the larger drawings have been reproduced at something like their original size. The text is every bit as evocative as the artwork. Here’s Mr Stevenson on the house at 933 East 222nd Street, from “Williamsbridge Wonders” (Williamsbridge is a neighborhood in the Bronx):

What 933 is actually made of is almost impossible to detect since most of the house is concealed behind a blaze of churning white wrought-iron. From its driveway gates, featuring white swans kissing floral arrangements, to its remarkable balcony, the house whispers of the tropics.

Makes you want to head uptown and check it out for yourself. Come finer weather…. And yet you’d have to make notes. Carrying the book itself on a tour would be thoroughly inconvenient. Doubtless some genius has managed to download the book onto his (or her!) iPhone.

The structures that Mr Stevenson describes, as well as the institutions that built them and the characters who strutted eccentrically through them (which he also describes), are rarely more than a hundred fifty years old. By European standards, they sprouted only the day before yesterday, and made it through a single night before suffering insidious neglect. Mr Stevenson, however, is able to invest them with all of the romantic charm of Tintern Abbey – with a seasoning of Big Wiseapple acidity. Fittingly, the book opens with a souvenir of the old Penn Station – forever lost, and never to be found.

In her Foreword, Kennedy Fraser captures an idea of the charm of Lost and Found New York:

I have known Stevenson for years, since we were colleagues at the old New Yorker magazine on West 43rd Street. Behind the successful artist and paterfamilias (whose own whiskers have turne dwhite by now) I have often seen what I see in Lost and Found New York, and in the pages of this book: the irrepressible ghost of a slender, boyish Jim, tugging at one’s sleeve. “Hey! I want to show you something really interesting! Take a look at this!”

Lost and Found New York is not the sort of book that hangs around in print for a long time (unless it’s a surprise best-seller, which I rather doubt will be the case here), so take my word for it and get yourself a copy pronto.

Now: what to do with those clippings?

The book pile has undergone meiosis: there are two piles. This happens. It happens often. Eventually, some of the books in each of the current piles get swept back into other, attendant piles. That will not happen this time!

I’m trying hard to finish The Stillborn God (Mark Lilla on religion and politics) by the end of the week, because I want to be done with it before we head off to St Croix. It’s not an easy read by any means, especially because there’s a great deal about Kant, and I have a preliminary problem with Kant that makes reading about his thought very difficult: how can anybody not have figured out that Kant is (a) unwholesome and (b) ridiculous? Much more appealing are two recent books by Ramsay MacMullen that I ordered from a catalogue of Yale books, Voting About God in Early Church Councils and Christians and Pagans in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries. These plainspoken titles fail to suggest the vibrancy of Prof MacMullen’s scholarship. But I’m saving both books – they’re quite slim - for St Croix.

Other books that I’ll be taking with me include three Miss Marple mysteries, all of which I know inside and out from the Joan Hickson adaptations (I haven’t yet moved on to the somewhat shorter Geraldine McEwans). I shall leave whatever I read behind at the hotel. I’m also taking Tony Attwood’s The Complete Guide to Asperger’s Syndrome.

I thought I’d have read The Abstinence Teacher by now, but it looks like something that I’ll get to after the Thanksgiving break.

As for this week’s Book Review (which has so many bad reviews that I set up a new section just for them.)

¶ The Colossus.

NYRB – the reprint arm of the New York Review of Books – continues to crank out brilliant Twentieth-Century titles that have long since disappeared into the black hole of the Great American Mid List. With the passage of time, these books are ripe for reconsideration apart from the brouhaha amidst which they were born (whether it was about them or not). New York poet James Schuyler’s What’s For Dinner? is a perfect example of the surprising book that one encounters in this series. It is a satirical novel, in its way, but it is too deeply amoral to have anything to do with social criticism. In other words, its satire is profound, and very amusing. Never has anyone better captured the sheer heartlessness of post-coital badinage – or more accurately measured its cooling off.

¶ What’s For Dinner?

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