As planned, Ms NOLA came up to Yorkville when her office closed for summer hours at one. M le Neveu, who was to come as well, was feeling under the weather, so he stayed in bed. It was a good day for staying in bed here in New York, and we wanted the late graduate student to be in a good shape for dinner. He is here for the weekend, and Kathleen and I took advantage of his presence in town to insist on a celebration at BLT Steak. What with her acquisition of a book, and his graduation from Columbia, there were ample grounds for congratulation. He is a genuine PhD now, and she an equally genuine editor in New York publishing. Both of them worked very hard to pass these milestones, and Kathleen and I are hugely proud of them.

So Ms NOLA and I had lunch by ourselves, at Tokubei, the Japanese pub across the street that is now open for lunch. Then we packed up enough Spode Blue Italian to serve six people. Once upon a time, I had twenty place settings of the pattern; it was our everyday china in the country. Kathleen kept saying that she didn’t like it very much, but I would always answer that, because it has been in continuous production since the year after Jane Austen died (or thereabouts), replacements are never a problem — unlike every other pattern in our pantry. Ten years after selling the country house, however, all that Blue Italian has turned into something of a white elephant. I was going to take a stack of it to Housing Works, but Ms NOLA expressed an interest, so we stashed stacks of plates and bowls in plastic grocery bags and stashed the plastic bags in sturdy LL Bean totes and (most important) grabbed a taxi to Hamilton Heights.

It was my plan to take a look round and then head home. But the weather outside was frightful, and it was much more agreeable to sit in Ms NOLA’s flat and talk about Aquinas and Kant with my nephew (who, in English, is really my cousin). Because our dinner reservation was for 6:30, I looked at my watch at 4:20 and decided just to hang until it was time to head for Park and 57th.

It has been a very long time since I just passed the time of day, as the saying goes, at home, much less at someone else’s house. Given the company, I found the experience most enjoyable, and my friends, who don’t get to spend enough time together these days, were most gracious about sharing themselves with me.

Just before lunch, I told Ms NOLA that I’d discovered a site that gives pronunciations for the tricky names of certain New Yorkers, and I’d learned that Nicholas Lemann, New Yorker contributor and dean of the Columbia School of Journalism, pronounces his name to sound like a well-known citrus fruit. Ms NOLA nodded her head with slightly melancholy smile, looking on the bright side of my catching up, once again, with the rest of the class.

Rather late this year, but never more sweepingly, I whipped the balcony into shape over the weekend. No monumental cleaning was required; just a bit of potting. I have finally accepted the impossibility, for reasons unknown, of building a perennial garden on our balcony. (I suspect that emissions from the trucks on First and Second Avenues poses a long-term insult, at least to the potting soil.) I ran the knickknacks on the hutch through the dishwasher, and wiped down the marble ice-cream table, and that was that. Or rather, that would have been that if I had not been on a stuff-ridding rampage.

There used to be five very large tubs of dirt; now there are two. There used to be a stock of empty clay pots. Now there are two empty clay pots, and they’re going to be filled with ivy the next time I make it down the street to Nicky’s. there used to be a stack of old (and very dirty) baskets. Those have been tossed, along with the hamper that housed a friteuse that I no longer use. There used to be a Blue Italian teapot that I had repaired and repurposed as a planter. Gone. A neat halogen lamp that we had gotten our use out of. Gone, gone, gone. It was immensely satisfying.

(The hutch was Kathleen’s idea: she had it built at Gothic Cabinet Craft (maker of everybody’s starter bookshelves in this part of town), thinking that it would be nice to look at from our bed — as indeed it is. It’s a bit the worse for wear, having spent six or seven (or more?) years out in the elements, but it hasn’t lost a whit of its charm. On a rare weekend, Kathleen spends hours in the wicker armchair, knitting or poring over catalogues. On a good day, it’s as nice as a cruise ship — a statement that I make in perfect ignorance of conditions aboard cruise ships.)

(The quaint bricks are actually a very durable plastic, installed by me shortly after the hutch arrived (it wouldn’t have been before — oh, no). They’re hollow and about two inches deep, so the step down from the living room isn’t what it used to be, and rainfall puddles out of sight.)

Ms NOLA came to dinner last night, and we celebrated happy developments in her career. Dinner was not especially complicated, but we sat at the table until just past eleven. I had already chosen links for tomorrow’s Daily Office, and I thought that writing them up would be a breeze. Ahem: Not after the bibulous evening, they weren’t. (Sancerre, Gigondas, Perrier-Jouet) Oh, no. I could hardly read the html page of the WordPress interface, and any wit conferred by Bacchus appeared to have evaporated — cooked off, as it were. I clawed my way to bed the moment the entry was finished.

I was asked what I’m reading. What I’m reading! An interesting idea — reading. I really ought to give reading a try. All I have to do is to stop writing. It’s too bad that I seem to be stuck in a tedious adaptation of a classic British film, called (in my case) The Red Keyboard.

Well, there they are, my new collection of blidgets, over there to the left. Instead of explaining what they are, I’ll ask you to play with them — you won’t get hurt! I think they’re pretty cool.

It’s my plan to change one or two of them every month, as the whim suits me. For the most part, I’ve chosen Web logs that have strong visual components; and I’ve steered away from ultra-well-known sites. For a start, anyway.

With luck, Widgetbox will take off, and all busy bloggers will offer their own blidgets, just as I’ve done way down on the right-hand side, below the Archives. I don’t know what happens when someone tries to “get” it, but these are early hours, much less days.

Right now, I’m waiting for one of the blogs to which I’ve blidgeted add a new entry.

* * *

I had a good day. I got to the movies very much on the early side —10:20 showings are rare — so, even with lunch at Burger Heaven and two grocery stops, I had a full afternoon for pottering. I spent a lot of time in the kitchen, and a lot of time at my desk, but I was never rushed or tense. It was just one thing after another — the way I like it.

For dinner, I made fried chicken again. When I dragged out the deep fryer last weekend, it had been a very long since I had made fried chicken. I made two miscalculations: the fat was too hot (by ten degrees), and, once it was done, I kept the chicken warm in too hot an oven. In other words, it was rather miserably  overcooked. This week, I avoided both mistakes, and the result was excellent.

* * *

And since I’m talking about food, I’d better describe the shrimp and vodka sauce that I improvised the other night. I shelled and deveined seven shrimp (don’t ask me, “why seven?”), and cut them into small pieces — three or four per. I minced a bunch of green onions, including a bit of the green. I minced two cloves of garlic. The shrimp, onions, and garlic stayed in separate bowls until I was ready to cook.

Into a hot saucepan that could have been smaller, I poured a teaspoon (or maybe two) of oil, and tossed in the shrimp right away. When the shrimp bits were partially pink, i tossed in the onions, and when the onions looked halfway done, in went the garlic. Less than a minute later, I deglazed with a splash of Vermouth. Then I threw in half a tub of Buitoni vodka sauce. I spooned in a few globs of Eli’s roast-tomato pasta sauce, just for texture — and to use up the sauce. When the spaghetti was cooked, I tossed it into the saucepan.  Lordy, it was good. And since I had a tub of frozen shrimp in the freezer, and the vodka sauce was left over from an earlier use, the only thing that I bought fresh for the dish was the bunch of green onions.

This evening, right after Kathleen went off to see Star Trek with Fossil Darling and Quatorze, I packed my leather shoulder bag with a few accoutrements and padded down 86th Street to Carl Schurz Park. I climbed the stone steps to the right of the allée and threaded my way to the walk the lies between the paved playing field and the children’s playground. I sat down at the first of the four (or is it five) chess table that alternate with park benches on the playground side of the walkway. I withdrew the accoutrements from my shoulder bag, placing them, as illustrated, on the table. I pressed the I/O button on the small, playing-card sized object that you can see to the right of the netbook. When the smaller light, the one to the left, began to flash, I opened the netbook, woke it up, and clicked to connect to the Verizon wireless network that headed the list of “available” wireless networks. And it really was available, because the password was already stowed in the dialogue box. 

The first thing that I did when machine connected to the Internet was to write to JM, signing myself as his Number One Satisfied Customer. JM calls himself a technician, but I regard him a local Manhattan deity.  

Shortly afterward, I packed up my bag and walked home. Mission accomplished. And without a hitch. The MiFi — Verizon’s wireless cellular router — works as advertised.

The picture that I want to run for this entry shows Kathleen and Jean Ruaud in the midst of a twinkling exchange at Le Bateau Ivre, the wine bar in the Pod Hotel. Perhaps Jean will give me permission to run it; maybe he won’t. He does not publish clear pictures of himself at his own blog. So, instead, you’re getting the Yodelling Pickle. Not to mention the Blue Willow mousepad.

But enough about fun and larks; let’s talk about activating our Verizon cellular wireless router. Wireless cellular router? I wouldn’t count on anyone at Verizon knowing what to call it, let me just tell you. Trying to activate the account online, house technician JM ran into a snag, and decided that we’d better call. To me, calling any kind of computer service provider is only marginally more bearable than being tossed into a dark closet for an indefinite term. In the end, JM achieved the activation online, but not before a the woman at FIOS Tech Support to whom we’d been shunted responded indignantly to my taking up her time. If I weren’t superstitious, I’d lodge a complaint. She certainly didn’t know what a MiFi was, and she made it clear that she couldn’t have cared less. Not the clearest speaker in America, she couldn’t be bothered to pronounce “FIOS” clearly enough for me to know whether the acronym began with an “F” or with a “V” — so I asked her to spell it, and that just about blew all her gaskets.

Let’s talk about how “simple” it is to install the new iPod Shuffle. Not interested? Now that I’ve mentioned it, I’m not, either.

Don’t ask me why, but I didn’t expect JM to be here for very long. I thought that the three installations du jour would be as painless as most are, but they were all difficult. A piece of gunk in the Dymo label printer’s feeder caused no end of trouble until it was found. Downloading the latest version of iTunes took preposterously long; indeed, it seemed to have stalled — an unpleasant reminder of the good old days of DOS, when the latest version of Word came on thirteen floppies. And printers never worked.

In any case, I didn’t get much done this afternoon. I was particularly looking forward to my new Friday routine of inventorying and tidying the kitchen. I was going to fry a batch of chicken, and  whip up some cole slaw and potato salad to go with it. I won’t say that I’ll do it tomorrow night, because I’m notorious for taking it easy on Saturdays, once I’ve tidied the apartment. And my “Friday routine” is still pretty aspirational: I’ve done it once.

“What do you mean, Jean’s permission? What about my permission?”

The gent in the photo is a newspaperman by the name of Arthur Brisbane. Kathleen and I are always struck by the resemblance that this particular likeness, standing on the edge of Central Park, bears to my father.

But enough about me. Jean Ruaud, of Mnémoglyphes, is in town, and he’s going to have to battle manfully to carve out some free time this week. Free time from me, that is. At dinner this evening, we planned trips to the must-see lunar craters that happen to be on loan to the city this month. Not to mention the ordinary stuff: the Staten Island Ferry, Prospect Park, the Isamu Noguchi thing in Queens “from which is gained [as Robert Benchley would have put it] an incomparable view of the Yorkville skyline.” Fort Tryon Park and the Brasserie have yet to be ruled out as beyond the strength of mere mortals. Happily for Jean, Kathleen and I have a long-planned dinner date with old friends on Wednesday night, and tickets to see Blithe Spirit for Thursday, so he’ll have some respite.

The wonderful thing about Jean is that Kathleen likes him as much as I do. It’s usual (and entirely natural, really) for me to like my friends just a little bit more than Kathleen does; but, in this case, I stand pre-empted.

Tomorrow will be Jean’s day off, relatively speaking. We’ll have lunch at one, and then I’ll conduct a walking tour of the quartier that won’t last more than two hours. Jean thought that he was visiting the Land of the Free, but in fact he has stumbled into the Gulag of Gotham. “And right over here, we have this interesting sculpture that resembles my father.“

Although I cleared my day for rare productivity — I dreamt of writing a good deal while also taking care of lots of little things. But I blew it by going downtown for lunch with Fossil Darling and Quatorze. Quatorze got a break from my esoteric movie roster (you’ll see what I mean) by accompanying the Fossil to the first showing of Angels and Demons. Although I’ve never seen The Da Vinci code, I will probably sneak a look at Angels just to see Ewan McGregor. But certainly not in a theatre.

When I got back from lunch, I frittered away two hours on who-knows-what. Then, when I sat down to work, the RoadRunner connection died. It was out for fifteen minutes at the most — but what a fifteen minutes! I can’t wait for MiFi, which Verizon will be releasing in a few days.

Although I saw the official “Friday movie” last night, I went to the movies again this evening. Kathleen has been wanting to see The Soloist, and tonight we finally found the time and the energy to catch the last showing. As I expected, I had a bit of trouble with aspects of the picture, but tears were running every time that Jamie Foxx’s character put bow to cello string. And I couldn’t help but wish that the actor would assume his given name, Eric Bishop. Kathleen, I’m happy to report, loved The Soloist, even though she found much of it harrowing. As who wouldn’t.

What really ate up the clock today was Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn. Yes — I think that I’ll blame it all on that. It’s a mistake to give these wild Irish authors the time of day, because that’s exactly what they’ll cost. Taking the train down to Bleecker Street before lunch, I read the passage in which a priest assigns a penance of just one Hail Mary, and it was so kind and beautiful and humane (not to mention pre-William Donohue) that I felt myself on the verge of a sob. When I got home, I swallowed as fast as I could, staving off the direr symptoms of froth-in-mouth disease, the final section of the novel, which turned out to be one of the most astutely constructed cliffhangers in the history of literature. Would she or wouldn’t she?

I was so moved by the reading of Brooklyn that I thought that I had better start keeping a list of books that prompt swooning responses. Books that, as I read them, I cannot imagine having read, living without, moving on from. Like Eilis Lacey, however, I do finish them and move on to other books, which sometimes take their place in my heart so completely that I forget about them — hence the need for a list. I asked myself: what other books have made you feel this keenly? And I couldn’t answer it. I hope to be true to Brooklyn, but, as the novel itself teaches, I’ll need a little help from circumstances. We are where we are, not where we loved being.

Just before we reached the Chinatown Brasserie on Lafayette Street, where we were going to have lunch after watching Tilda Swinton’s harrowing but really rather funny performance in Julia, Quatorze tapped my arm: someone famous was approaching. I looked up and saw Lauren Hutton. She looked at me and saw something as well. She gave me the strangest, most wonderfully complex look that I have ever received from someone I didn’t know. It said: “How sweet that you recognize me. Be the gent that I can tell that you are and don’t stare.” I dropped my eyes at once — to her interesting sneakers. Her look was equal parts smile and admonition. I’m sure that I remember her giving it to Richard Gere in American Gigolo.

It was no surprise that, even without makeup or dyed hair, Ms Hutton was a beautiful woman. What did surprise was her height, which IMDb gives as 5’6½”. “Shorter than me,” marveled Quatorze.

At lunch, I realized that I was going to be late for my appointment with JM, the computer wizard whom Kathleen, coming home early this afternoon, finally met, and thanked for “making it possible for me to live with my husband.” Quatorze and I didn’t dally, but the trains were against me, and the doormen, whom I called the moment I emerged from the subway, didn’t answer the phone. So there was JM in what passes for the lobby these days, as patient as a saint. I don’t think that I was as much as ten minutes late,  but I wasn’t best pleased with myself. He did venture that I might have called him. But no, I insisted, I have never made a record of his telephone number on the very rare occasions when we have communicated that way. I should have considered that a kind of theft. (JM has done everything imaginable to make my computing life easy. But he has never, ever said “Here’s my number; just give me a call.” He always responds to emailed SOSs with alacrity.) The thing was, if the machine that he had come uptown to configure — a netbook — had been operational, I’d have emailed him from the table at the restaurant. This thought had peppered my pleasure with a lunch of dim sum and cold sesame noodles — Chef Ng’s adaptation, by the way, is refreshingly underspiced. 

My resolution — what would Friday be without a resolution? — is to treat the Asus netbook as a toy for at least a month. I won’t expect it to work, in other words. I won’t count on it to connect me with the Internet when I’m running around town. I’ll just see what it does, and what it doesn’t do. “Getting to know all about you” — that sort of thing. On the seventeenth, Verizon will start selling MiFi wireless cellular routers, and we’re going to get one. That’s when the trial month will properly begin. It’s funny, but I haven’t been as excited by a new computer since my very first one, an IBM Peanut.

Eventually, of course, I will insist that the netbook work. That’s what computers are for — PCs, anyway. Apples are for play. It’s astonishing, how many Apple users think that play is better than work.

Early this afternoon, Kathleen turned on her computer, planning to slog through a somewhat tedious work-related project while surrounded by the comforts of home. Bad weather seemed to compensate for the the inconvenience of drafting with just one monitor.

She ended up going to the office after all. Although her laptop instantly connected with the apartment’s wireless network, her browsers and whatnot remained strangely out of touch. We still don’t know why, but the damage was very gooey. A system-restore was eventually effected, remotely, by the local divinity to whom we turn in times of such distress, and that seemed to clear up the problem. Did some long-dormant and undetectable virus spring to life over the weekend? Possibly.

For the most part, I sat by the laptop, trying to read the Times but finding my attention sorely distracted by the wizardry of a darting cursor and the illusion of spontaneously-opening panes. Occasionally, I had to transmit a password — from another computer, of course.

So I didn’t have the day that I’d planned, either. Here’s what I did not do:

• Read The Economist.  
• Plant the geraniums and pansies that have been in flats for ten days now.
• Remove the three CD carousels from beneth the long sofa in the living room and replace them with bins full of letters and Christmas cards. If you just re-read the foregoing because you thought that you must have misread it, or I miswritten it, then you’ll have some idea of my enthusiasm for this project. It will, however, be a step forward.
• Bake madeleines.

When I sat down to compose tomorrow’s Daily Office, my head was just about as gooey as Kathleen’s Windows files. Trolling through the shoals of RSS feeds turned up a lot of same-old same-old news. I’d say that it is taking the mainstream media a long time to get with the Obama program: we’re in for a long, hard season of boring but elementary appraisals and fixes that won’t make for catchy copy. The president, it turns out, is no more  interested in being newsworthy than his predecessor was; but, unlike Mr Bush, he does not do crazy things and then wonder why the dogs of the press are nipping at his heels.

The current administration is so boringly sane that Frank Rich was reduced, in his column today, to comparing last week’s “photo-shoot” fiasco (the one involving Air Force One_N) to FDR’s second-term exercises in hubris (attempting to pack the Supreme Court, for one). Mr Rich writes excitingly about the collapse of the Republican Party —

Not long before The Wall Street Journal informed its readers that 81 percent of Americans liked Obama, Karl Rove wrote in its pages that “no president in the past 40 years has done more to polarize America so much, so quickly.”

— but the lack of passed gas emanating from the White Houses leaves him gasping.

Which is exactly why the mainstream media may never get used to the new regime. They can’t afford to. They’re fighting, as Mr Rich himself points out, for their lives. On Friday, Jason Kottke responded to a Morning News poll with the names of three publications that he reads in print. (The New Yorker, The New York Times on weekends, and, once in a while, Wired.)

If that’s the future, then I’m very much the past: the Times every day; The New Yorker, The Nation, L’Express International, and The Economist weekly, The Atlantic and Harper’s monthly, and now, the Columbia Journalism Review — I don’t know how often that comes out. Not to mention a list of literary magazines (books, really) running from Granta on down. And of course the three literary “tabloids”: The New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, and the eccentrically-published Bookforum. (I also pay an extra twenty bucks a year for the digital edition of NYRB, largely so that I can quote it here, something that “I ought to do more often” — the motto of this entire litany.)

Periodicals that I no longer take: Foreign Affairs (grand, but semi-professional; information is one thing, and smoke-signals are another); TLS (all smoke-signals); and The New Republic (because I disagree apoplectically with its editorial staff’s position on Palestine). A magazine that I wouldn’t dream of having in the house: New York. I considered the alternative and stuck with it. The Observer evokes the most frightful memories of high school.

Oh! I forgot Vanity Fair and France-Amérique. Shame on me. Time was, I wouldn’t have Vanity Fair in the house, either. Now I consider it to be The New Yorker’s drolly wayward first cousin — Eloise to Harriet the Spy.

Of all these publications, it’s the Times that seems the most to be in trouble, not only financially but purposively. What, exactly, is it for? The Times appears to have nothing like the clarity about its readership that the Daily News (“left”) and the Post (reactionary) enjoy. Its friends carp almost as loudly as its foes. Right now, I’d say that the Times is engaged in a no-win joust. I don’t know what the Gray Lady is up against, exactly, but the horse that she’s riding is called Institutional Nostalgia.  

Would I trade my daily Times, delivered to the door, for unassailable Internet access — meaning a guarantee against ever having to spend an afternoon tethered to a computer damaged by malware? You bet I would.

I spent most of a soggy afternoon in Brooklyn — without leaving the blue room of my apartment. After the movie (The Limits of Control) and lunch (with Ms NOLA, at the Knickerbocker), Quatorze and I headed uptown to Yorkville. Q was nice enough to hang a couple of pictures, something that it has become very difficult for me to do, given my rigid neck. Even when my neck was as supple as anybody’s, though, I never hung pictures as quickly and neatly as Quatorze.

When the work was done and much admired, I ought to have thanked my friend and sent him on his way, because I had this page to write, among other sitely tasks, not to mention a concert to attend. But it was much more interesting to sink into my chair with a cup of tea and listen to Quatorze’s stories of boyhood in Sunset Park — in the parish of St Catherine of Alexandria, at any rate. One or two of the stories I had heard before, but from other angles, as it were, and other connections. It occurred to me that Quatorze really ought to be writing his stories down. They’re very funny, but they’re also very local. The Brooklyn that he remembers is long gone, and I hope that he’ll take steps to assure that it doesn’t vanish altogether.

When the conversation fell to details about the periphery of Prospect Park, there was only one thing to do: refer to Google Maps. I didn’t know that Quatorze had never spent any time with Google Maps — that he didn’t even know it existed. Hours later, he left the apartment somewhere between fandom and addiction.

Given the weather, and Kathleen’s exhaustion, I made the decision, at about seven, to skip tonight’s chamber recital at the Museum. I regret having to do so, I did have to do so. I might have gone by myself, but the work that hadn’t been done while Quatorze and I searched for the Palais de la Lanterne would have distracted me from the music.

Does anyone know of a blog that follows the Marshall Trial? Times coverage (by John Eligon and James Barron) has been pretty exciting. The opening arguments were spicy: the prosecution all but fingered Charlene Marshall, the defendant’s younger wife (and I am convinced that this case is all about cherchez la Charlene), while the defense proposed that the late Mrs Astor was niggardly about donating her own money to charity — not a tack that I’d have recommended taking. Now, novelist and attorney Louis Auchincloss, a good-enough friend of the late doyenne, takes the stand to make the following flabbergasting but correct assertion:

Mr. Auchincloss said Mrs. Astor could not have been capable of understanding details of a will “if she did not know me.”

The Week at Portico: Those few paragraphs about Waiting for Godot that I mentioned last night may be read here. And of course there’s the Book Review review.

On Friday evening, both Kathleen and I went over to the Upper West Side branch of Barnes & Noble to be on hand when Donna Leon appeared. Kathleen’s manifest interest ought to be all the recommendation that you need to start reading Ms Leon’s Commissario Brunetti novels. They were recommended by one of Kathleen’s clients well over ten years ago, but, having passed the tip on to me, Kathleen didn’t look into the books herself until quite recently, whereupon she became a big fan.

The place was packed. It was clear that Ms Leon’s readership had made the logarithmic jump between 82nd Street and Union Square. True, everyone was older than we were, or nearly. But if Ms Leon has younger fans, you can’t expect them to let themselves be caught dead on the Upper West Side on a Friday night. It was wonderfully idiotic of B & N to pipe an invitation to the reading through the store not once but twice after the event space became almost too crowded for safety. The events manageress did come up with an ingenious idea for getting rid of people: she warned us that a German television team would be filming the event. Anyone who didn’t want to be caught on German television ought, therefore, to leave. Once upon a time, a clutch of principled Upper West Siders would have marched out. But that was our parents’ generation.

For those of you who thirst for information about the Leon of Venice, I report the following items:

• Signorina Elettra is based on Roberta’s aunt. And she gets her name from the aunt’s mother. Something like that. The aunt was working for an executive of the Banco d’Italia’s Venice branch during the period of South African proscription. One day, when her boss asked her to take a letter to a banker in J’burg, the aunt “declined.” To the apoplectic banker she sliced the air with her hands. “I am going to leave now, and have a cup of coffee. You can organize your thoughts, and, when I return, we will do something else.” When Ms Leon heard this story, she knew she had the right secretary for Vice-Questore Patta.
• There will be a Paola Brunetti cookbook. It will appear in German later this year and in English in 2010. The recipes will be written by Ms Leon’s best friend, Roberta, who has served not only as Ms Leon’s reason for being in Venice (“I’d have settled wherever she and Franco” — Roberta’s husband — “lived”) but also as the inspiration for Paola’s quite fantastic lunchtime menus.
• Ms Leon recently took four meetings in London with prospective producers of Brunetti videos. She has a favorite — which means that she has no objection to adapting her novels for the screen (and why would she, since the whole Brunetti business supports her true love, Il complesso barocco, an opera company noted for its Handel recordings, which, if you are a Brunetti fan, you will buy).
• The Teatro la Fenice mounts operas about thirty nights in the year. The Spoleto Festival doesn’t pay its bills — claiming that everybody performs pro bono. For these reasons, Ms Leon’s opera company does not work in Italy.
• Translations of the Brunetti books into Italian remain unauthorized. Ms Leon is, quite rightly, I think, convinced that Italian-language readers (as distinct from Italian readers of German or English) would devote themselves to pointing out that she understands nothing of life in Venice — not really.
• Like Paola, Ms Leon is a smartass. At a Fourth of July party on the Grand Canal, given by a rich American woman, with the kind of guests that rich American women attract, someone who couldn’t remember Ezra Pound’s name asked, “Who was that crazy old guy who supported the fascists?” As if compelled by Tourette’s, Ms Leon replied, “Ronald Reagan.”

The handymen were here this morning to change the filters on the HVAC units. (I think that that stands for “heating, ventilating, air-conditioning.”) The units are positioned beneath the windows, naturally. So is a lot of furniture, and a great deal of terrifying wiring. The wiring is all mine, but I can’t summon the courage to clean it up.

Certainly not today, when I can hardly see straight. M le Neveu, who is in town this weekend, dropped by last night to pick something up, and I looked so tired that he nicely asked if he could grate the block of cheddar that I had set out for macaroni & cheese. No, I thanked him; grating cheese would keep me standing. I might slip into a coma otherwise.

In any case, I had to stay home and move the furniture for the handymen; so, no Friday movie. I went ahead and did my Saturday cleaning, which made all the more sense in view of tomorrow afternoon’s schedule: I’ll be taking some friends on a tour of the Museum. In the evening, we’ve got Waiting for Godot. D’you remember that National Lampoon Radio hour parody in which a bus pulls up and Godot gets off? “Hi, guys…” I don’t think that we’ll be seeing that version.

The Week at Portico: This week’s four new pages: ¶ Yiyun Li’s quietly remarkable novel, The Vagrants. The more I read about modern China (the novel is set in 1979), the better I understand Beijing’s prickly attitude toward Western misunderstandings. ¶ Christopher Hampton’s 1970 comedy, The Philanthropist, with Matthew Broderick, is packing them in at the American Airlines Theatre. The revival had me daydreaming about Alan Bennett. ¶ Faubourg 36 (marketed here, idiotically, as Paris 36) is the first live-action film to command the uncluttered grace of comic books, and as such it opens a world of new possibilities to the movie musical. ¶ This week’s Book Review review — they ought to have put Animal Spirits, by George Akerlof and Robert Shiller, on the cover.

The weather turned colder today, but I was too sick with spring fever not to spend the morning reading the Times and The Economist by an open window, drinking cup after cup of Kona. (The Kona was in honor of Kathleen’s birthday, which we’ve been celebrating for a while but which actually did fall today.) Presently my distress could not be overlooked. The week’s fatigue seemed to have given way to some kind of genuine illness. There was, for example, a frightening burp that very nearly exploded into something much worse. By six o’clock I back in bed, so cold that only a flannel nightshirt would do.

By eight, I was back up again, reading in my chair — the window firmly closed. I wanted very badly to read The Song Is You, Arthur Phillips’s deeply etched new novel, but I couldn’t; I’d have risked a new but, I think, very practical rule. It is a bad idea to finish a novel before I’ve written up the one that I read just before it. The one just before it was The Vagrants, by Yiyun Li. The trick to writing about The Vagrants is to convey something of the enormous excitement of the book’s many narrative strands, a task that most readers would dismiss as bound to fail if told too much about the novel’s period and setting. The trick to writing The Vagrants itself seems to have been to capture the interest that people take in their own lives. Not to describe the interest, but to represent it, with all the force of a Renaissance illusion. By comparison, even a writer as discreet as Jane Austen seems to fill every page of her novels trumpeting her own ideas about her characters’ choices. Ms Li would seem to have learned a great deal from cinematic storytelling, but with the difference that the existential quality of five or six is completely realized, from an interior beyond the camera’s reach.

Since I couldn’t read fiction, then, I turned to Postwar, Tony Judt’s magnum opus, which has been out for nearly four years. Better late than never? Clearly: the book is indispensable. I don’t know when I began reading it; I’d like to say, “last year,” but I’m not so sure. I’m quite near the end, gratified to read views about European affairs that I almost always share.

And I read a lot of magazines: Atlantic, Harper’s, L’Express. I can’t claim to have read the French periodical, but the photographs are always great, and it was nice to recognize Bernadette Chirac without having to read the legend. There was also an amusing photograph of the Mayor of Paris, Bernard Delanoë looking, frankly, rather fishy. Perhaps he looked fishy because I was sitting beneath an ornate tapestry of the city’s armorials. You’ll remember that these center on a small boat on the wavy seas. The words “non mergitur” were strikingly legible. What I gleaned from the story is that M Delanoë has been AWOL, sulking about his failure to wrest the PS from the Royals. Don’t take my word for it, though; I didn’t really read anything.

Wouldn’t it be droll if Mr Delanoë switched jobs with Michael Bloomberg? Bloomberg in Paris — it’s worthy of Offenbach at least. Imagine Sarko’s nail-biting despair — I hear a choir of double-basses, right out of Otello. And then there would be the out-of-town picnic (“O Beau Pays de Touraine”) in which Carla Bruni (accompanied by Winterhaltrian bevies) approaches the New Yorker with rapprochemdent in mind — only to find that she has never known what love is, until now! “(“Mon beau Bonaparte, fais de moi ta Beauharnais!”)

I’ve been tempted to write about Mayor Bloomberg’s machinations vis-à-vis the MTA rescue plan, currently blocked by six troglodytic Dems from the boroughs whose constituents will eventually have to be persuaded of the necessity of tolling intra-city bridges. But that would violate another new rule: no writing about stories that haven’t come to conclusion (“Bridges to be Tolled!”)

Which also means staring down the temptation to write about my health.

Yesterday, the weekend’s legacy of fatigue finally materialized. I was writing about last Friday’s movie, Faubourg 36 (which I saw on Monday, actually), when I realized that the eighth or ninth paragraph was in fact my “lead,” and that the entire piece would have to be rearranged, if not rewritten. Lordy.

This sort of thing doesn’t happen very often, but when it does, I try to deal with it manfully. That was beyond me yesterday. I felt the way you do when you’ve just lost a ten-page paper, and you’ve got to reconstruct all the fantastic lines that came so easily the first time around but that become teasing, evanescent ghosts when you’ve got to will them back into being.

So I took the rest of the day off. I know; I know: I said that I was going to take Monday off. I watched the BBC adaptation of Alan Hollinghurst’s great novel about the Eighties, The Line of Beauty. “Is that what you should be watching?” Kathleen asked, knowing how low I get when I’m exhausted. She had a point — I felt awful for about an hour after it was over. But by then I was deep into the novel on the cover of this week’s Book Review.

The Week at Portico: Although I drafted a few new pages this week, only one of them was beaten into presentable shape, this week’s Book Review review.

Here’s hoping that you had a happy Easter, if Easter was on your calendar. For us, the holiday sometimes coincides, within a week or less, with Kathleen’s birthday — also the birthday of the terrific husband of a Brearley classmate, whose own birthday falls about a week earlier. The cluster of birthdays makes a springtime party look like a very good idea. And the end of Lent is a favorable development for menu planning.

And it was a lovely party, if I do say so myself. I kept things simple: two classic ragoûts (a navarin printanier and a blanquette de veau, the latter with the Upper West Side inflection of a dose of dill) and a cake from Greenberg’s. I also made a trio of hors d’oeuvres, which in the event nobody touched, knowing that dinner would probably not leave anybody hungry. Still, it was about time that I made tapenade again, and it was good to taste a more recent addition to the repertoire, salpicon de crevettes. As for the third, it had been so long since I made what Kathleen calls “ham roll-ups” that I might as well never have made them before. More about them some other time. As I say, nobody touched them, except for Kathleen and me.

Giving a party, though — it had been a while. I honestly can’t recall the last time that I prepared anything more ambitious than a dinner for four. (A steak dinner at that.) Not that I’d forgotten how; I got to the “riding a bicyle” stage in the kitchen about fifteen years ago. It was, rather, a question of how to fit the cooking in with my ramped-up ambitions here.

So I gave myself a day off. Today. I went to the movies with Quatorze. We saw Faubourg 36, a French Mrs Henderson Presents that exacted an additonal gallon of happy tears. We had lunch at the Chinatown Brasserie. Then we went to the Strand, so that I could buy a hard-to-get exhibition catalogue. That’s where I left my glen plaid cap. Quatorze, who lives nearby, went back later, to try to retrieve it, but it was too late. At home, I sat in front of an open window while I caught up with feeds. This added a sore throat to my worries.

Feeling tired now, at the age of sixty-one, is not what feeling tired used to be. Now, it’s frightening — physically. It comes with a vivid sensory image of being buried alive, not in a coffin, but in deep fatigue. Fatigue so chronic that it becomes invisible. I don’t feel tired in this mode; I just get very stupid. I absent-mindedly leave my cap at the Strand. A bit more tired, and I’d absent-mindedly walk in front of a bus.

There are no buses in the apartment, though, so fatality is unlikely. Amazingly, I haven’t dropped anything during cleanup. The apartment is almost back to normal. Tomorrow’s Daily Office is up. There’s a little bit of navarin left over. But I’ve saved the best news for last: now that Lent is over, Kathleen can eat as many of Greenberg’s chocolate cookies as she likes. She can even eat just one!

You hear a lot about “stewardship” these days — and you’re sure to hear more. Stewardship is an old mode of thought that is being refitted for unprecedented circumstances. In the past, stewards took care of things on behalf of powerful employers, better known as magnates; stewards constituted, in turn, a very small clutch of employees. Just as there weren’t many magnates, there weren’t many stewards. From now on, though, we’re all going to be stewards, and we’ll be taking care of things on behalf of unborn generations. We don’t really know how this works.

One thing that stands out in Mark Bowden’s Vanity Fair profile of Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr, the current ruler of the grand duchy known as The New York Times, is that Mr Sulzberger is an honorable steward, a man who has done everything that he can think of to make sure that the newspaper that he inherited is passed on to readers of the future. As Mr Bowden’s parallel sketch of the parlous state of the newspaper industry in general and the Times in particular makes clear, however, this essentially conservative mission may well be wrong-headed, even disastrous, endangering the very thing that Mr Sulzberger wants to protect.

To their credit, the Sulzbergers have long treated the Times less as a business than as a public trust, and Arthur is steeped in that tradition, rooted in it, trained by it, captive to it. Ever the dutiful son, he has made it his life’s mission to maintain the excellence he inherited—to duplicate his father’s achievement. He is a careful steward, when what the Times needs today is some wild-eyed genius of an entrepreneur.

Glimmering beneath the sparkle of Mr Bowden’s stern but compassionate prose is the sorrow of a young man — nearing sixty, Mr Sulzberger still seems to be young, almost inappropriately so — who is neither a journalist nor a businessman, but only a well-intentioned citizen, trying to steer an institution through rapids that require a cracking expertise in one field or the other (probably business). At only one point does Mr Bowden advance a possible solution.

In fairness, no one has the answer for newspapers. Some, such as former Time managing editor Walter Isaacson, Alan D. Mutter, a former newspaperman and Silicon Valley C.E.O., and Peter Osnos, of PublicAffairs, all of whom have experience as executives, are pushing some form of micro-payment. If the Times, in partnership with the big search-engine companies, got paid a few pennies for every person who clicks on a link to its content, it might replace the old business model for advertising. The price of accessing a single item would be so small that it would hardly be worth the trouble to hunt up a pirated version. Some have suggested that all of the major news providers should band together and withhold their content from the Internet until such a pricing agreement can be put in place. It seems clear that drastic action is required. One top editor at another newspaper put it this way: “Ask yourself this—if the Internet existed and newspapers didn’t, would there be any reason to invent newspapers? No. That tells you all you need to know.”

Let us hope that people close to Mr Sulzberger make sure that the urgency of this paragraph is made clear to him, and that he finds the courage to delegate leadership to the best wild-eyed genius, not just to the one who hits it off best with him.

The Week at Portico: ¶ Kate Lindsey sang at the Museum last Friday, accompanied by Ken Noda. Kathleen was too tired to go — although not too tired to join me afterward at Caffè Grazie for dinner. She missed a good one! ¶ I wrestled with John Wray’s Lowboy for days before realizing that I’d been misled by the sheaf of careless reviews that this somewhat mixed book has generated, but James Wood came to the rescue, and helped me to clear away the common reading. It happens from time to time that I read a “hot” book and like it well enough, but come away thinking that it can’t be very good, because it doesn’t measure up to the run of reviews. Instead of feeling out-of-it and curmudgeonly, I must remember that most reviews are dashed off by harried Grub Streeters, and quite likely to mischaracterize unusual, but compelling, books such as Mr Wray’s. ¶ Somehow, I don’t fall into the trap where movies are concerned; I believe that I don’t expect very much from movie critics, with whom, in any case, I expect to disagree. I may be wildly wrong about Un baiser, s’il vous plaît, but I certainly enjoyed thinking (and writing) about it. ¶ Joseph O’Neill kicks off this week’s Book Review with an appreciation of Samuel Beckett’s youthful letters. It’s hard, though, to think of Beckett as ever having been youthful.

Looking through a catalogue this afternoon, in search of storage solutions to my CD/DVD situation, I was amused to espy, on the lower shelf of a bedside table, in a sunny, colorful, and quite unstudious room, a harmonious stack of seven pistachio-jacketed Loeb Classics. Greek, in other words; not Latin (which would be raspberry). 

The picture is funny and not funny at the same time. It’s not funny because only one customer in umpteen thousands will appreciate how preposterous it would be (the funny part) to keep seven Loeb classics in an insouciant pile at one’s bedside. Two might be impressive — the Iliad, or the Odyssey. Even four would not be entirely grotesque (Pausanias?). But seven — seven has got to be Plutarch. The rule for readers of Plutarch in the Twenty-First Century is that perusing more than one volume must take place at a library table, not in bed. You can just hear the lucky spouse: “Okay, they’re green! They’re effing lovely! Now turn out the light!”

It’s possible that even the photo shoot’s designer wasn’t in on the joke. “I found this gorgeous color on a shelf at the Union League Club, when a client took me to lunch. They’re so old!” Wonderfully eliding the books’ arguable age with the indisputable antiquity of their contents. They’re so old, they didn’t even have books back then!

My favorite catalogue these days is Levenger’s collection of “Tools For Serious Readers.” Readers’ porn, I call it. I do not exaggerate! Levenger promises, literally, to make writing into an erotic experience. A page of fancy pens is headed: “Sublime designs to spark your creativity.” How about this:

Prepare to be more productive. Know what scholars and scribes have known for two thousand years when you experience for yourself how inclined work surfaces can help you read, write and work more productively…

Scholars and scribes! Two thousand years! We all know what “know” means, especially in two thousand year-old contexts! Even better:

“And that has made all the difference.” This line, the denouement of Robert Frost’s celebrated poem “The Road Not Taken,” is an appropriate introduction to the Morgan Note Card Traveler. Its three lengthwise pockets offer room to tuck inside your to-dos, cards, schedules, photos and brainstorming notes. At back is a display stand, which folds flat via hidden magnets…

All the hidden magnets in the world are not going to inspire another poem as pithy and beloved as Frost’s.

But that’s not the gravamen of my complaint. I don’t want my money back because my “L-Tech writing instrument” — although it did indeed allow me to “carve words with precision” — didn’t inspire me to pen the long-awaited sequel to The Great Gatsby. No! I did pen the sequel to The Great Gatsby, and it’s terrific; I’ve got it right here! But, you know what? I didn’t even realize that I was writing with the L-Tech. I was completely unconscious of the reams of “top quality pads for professionals” that I covered with Scribner-worthy prose! I might just as well have used foolscap!

What’s the point of bundling my work in a Circa Master Folio if I don’t look out the window when I’m working, much less hope that I’ll “expand my horizons”? Where’s that tingle of writing masterpieces with edgy equipment? Here I went to all this trouble to do justice to Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, and I never noticed that the wife had replaced my door-on-sawhorses arrangement with a Rumination Station!

I never knew!

In the middle of yesterday’s editing storm, a friend sent me the link to a heartbreaking story about abandoned infants who die in the back seats of cars. I was going to link to the story from last night’s Compline, but I couldn’t bring myself to end a week of links on that sorry note.

As my friend pointed out, the story has many rich tangents. But one stood out for me so strongly that I just about lost sight of the others. These ghastly car deaths became frequent only after federal regulations ordained the rear-facing, back-seat infant car seat. It’s pretty obvious why this design, however “safe” would fail the test of human cognition. And yet prosecutors — agents of the state that promulgated the mistake — have charged some unlucky parents with manslaughter and worse.

No one believes in the virtue of enlightened regulation more passionately than I do; but my enthusiasm is greatly tempered by the recognition that stupid regulations feed libertarian wet dreams. As someone who thought he was going the extra mile, back in 1972, by dumping his baby daughter in a reconfigured shopping basket, sans seat belts, I’d like to see the Chicken Littles driven out of safety regulation. If they don’t in fact do more harm than good, let’s hear about it; I suspect that they do. A child who dies in a collision in the front seat of a car dies a happier death — for the rest of us, which is what counts here — than the one who languishes in hundred-degree heat in the back seat of a car before succumbing to hyperthermia (even though it’s actually sixty degrees outside the car) because rear-facing car seats, however rational, turn out to be sublimely unreasonable.

The Week at Portico: Alexei Volodin played at the Museum last week, and, breaking a long private jinx, I wrote about it (nothing much). Even more liberating was tossing off a few paragraphs about Zoë Heller’s wry-Manhattan family portrait, The Believers. And, of course, the usual suspects, le minimum, as Albin puts it at the train station — the Book Review review, which you really ought to check out just for Alison Bechdel’s graphic, a first, and Sunshine Cleaning, which I saw with Kathleen, a rare event. (She liked it, too.)

Last weekend, it was books. This weekend, it was movies. But you don’t want to hear about my storage sagas. While Kathleen was packing for Coral Gables last night, we watched Laura, simply because, of the 220 DVDs that were taken down from shelves, removed from plastic boxes, and slipped into album sleeves, Otto Preminger’s 1944 classic was the one to hit a snag in my consciousness.

In the middle of Laura, Kathleen made the most astonishing remark. “I always confuse this with All About Eve.” She proceeded to offer a plausible explanation. You have to admit: it could have been called All About Laura. In any case, we had to watch Joseph Mankiewicz’s 1951 classic next — not that either one of us was awake for the ending.

Kathleen’s slight confusion must have thrown my antennae into overfeel, because one of Eve’s best-known scenes struck me in an entirely novel way. (Novel for me, I hasten to add.) It was the scene in which Margot Channing shows up very late for a reading with Miss Casswell, Addison DeWitt’s protégée. Having encountered Addison in the lobby, she enters the theatre perfectly well aware that Eve has stood in for her, giving a reading of the part of Cora that was full of “fire and music.” Her lover, Bill, and her playwright, Lloyd, behave as though it’s unreasonable (ie feminine) of her to be upset about her younger understudy’s encroachment.

What was new last night was that I saw the men’s response as a pretense, as a boys’ own club maneuver to wink away the bad faith of having let Eve read. They must have known that Margot would be furious when she found out, and they probably ought to have seen to it that there was nothing for Margot to find out. Instead, they indulged the pleasure of indulging a pretty young lady, and now they demonize their victim, framing her as an “hysterical woman.” When Bill “realizes” that Margot must have been wound up by Addison, the reptilian critic is saddled with the moral blame, but at the cost of Margot’s reputation for self-control.

Even more interesting was the aftertaste of grasping that, in order for the foregoing to be true, the two men must understand a thing or two about women, instead of being the clueless dudes that they pretend to be throughout the initial phase of Margot’s meltdown.

As for Laura, if I didn’t see anything altogether new, I was battered once again by the film’s modern raciness. Despite its thoroughgoing theatricality, Laura is every inch an adult feature — freakishly so, for the times.

There were lots of empty seats at Alexei Volodin’s smashing recital at the Museum last night, and I don’t think that it had anything to do with a weak demand for tickets. Gotham has been down with a cold for a few weeks now — a cold or worse. What can I say? Maybe Bernie Madoff reduced everybody’s health reserves to zilch. That smirk of his was certainly bacillic.

Despite our own frailties, Kathleen and I did make it to the recital, but we were close to walking wounded. The week began weak; I couldn’t imagine how I’d get anything done. By yesterday afternoon, though — by seven o’clock, actually, just in time to head off to hear Mr Volodin — I’d written up the ideal number of new pages for Portico: four. I was so pleased, in fact, that the blessed event can’t possibly recur until summer. (I say that as a way of hexing it — a fertility charm.)

Today, I’ve got to be at the Tower East at ten, for Duplicity, and at the Museum two and a half hours later, for lunch with Ms NOLA and her parents, two of my most favorite people. Folleggiare di gioia in gioia…

The Week at Portico: A book at last: Michael Klein’s memoir of too many things to cram into a thumbnail (much less, you’d think, his short book!), Track Conditions. (Okay; there are horses.) This week’s movie is I Love You, Man, a delightful comedy about movie comedies. As for Legit, the night before last, we saw the most memorable one-man show ever, Humor Abuse — don’t bother reading about it; just buy some tickets. And of course this week’s Book Review review, which features an ever-so-slightly fishy cover review by Colm Tóibín.