And so we come to the first day of the weekend — Friday. That’s how we do things around here, anyway.

Four days of eight more or less significant links, each presented within the context of a given canonical hour — At Lauds, for example, I try to link to an interesting item about the Seven Lively Arts (books come in at Vespers) — is as much as I can do, and also, at least with my current astronomical equipment, about as far as I can see.

Now I’m off to the movies — to see The Reader.

Bon weekend à tous!

Having rung in yet another New Year — on New Year’s Day, for a change, not the night before — I thought I’d better get back on track with a Friday movie. I made a date on Thursday night to see Last Chance Harvey with LXIV, at a theatre just round the corner from his house. After tea and dolce with Kathleen, I got myself onto the IRT in plenty of time. On the ride downtown, I read about half of a terrific essay on video games by the English man of letters, John Lanchester, in the London Review of Books. Mr Lanchester points out (not in the same sentence) that the popular games combine all the tedium and effort of the workaday world with fantasy violence. I endeavor to bear in mind that my remarkable inaptitude at games — I have barely enough hand-eye coordination to operate an iPod — is no excuse for taking a condescending attitude toward Grand Theft Auto IV, but it’s no use.

I climbed out of the subway fifteen minutes before the appointed time. What to do? I could cross Union Square and browse at Barnes & Noble. Or — what’s this? A big Virgin sign hung at a corner a block away. A record store! I couldn’t believe that such a thing still existed. In fifteen minutes I could check the place out.

Like most stores that I’ve been in since Christmas, Virgin was close to empty, which only made its spotlighted lampblack interior look like a horror movie that nobody wanted to see. There were the usual undistinguished beats and jags of crashingly tedious noise, presumably intended to signify a locus of Dionysiac release even at this midday hour. It didn’t take long to find the serious music, downstairs. Jazz and the classics are collected in a large space beneath the entrance. Unless there was a pop-music department hidden away somewhere, I’d have to say that the days when serious music was shoehorned into the odd corner appear to be over. If I’d had more time, I’d have tested my theory that serious music will keep the CD manufacturers in business. Once again, I might add. I picked up Renée Fleming’s new-looking album of Schubert lieder, actually over ten years old. And “The Best of Cal Tjader/Live at the Monterey Jazz Festival 1958-1980.” Why not.

The Virgin store happens to sit beneath the Regal Union Square Theatre, which is where LXIV and I were to see Last Chance Harvey. Twenty yards from door to door. But because LXIV would be waiting at his apartment for my buzz, my route A to B took me in a clockwise direction, round the other way, down Fourth Avenue, across Thirteenth Street and up Broadway. We New Yorkers love walking so much that we don’t mind strolling around the block just to get back into the same building.

I will have more to say about Last Chance Harvey presently, but I can report that LXIV and I liked it very much. There were some rather shattering moments of muted humiliation for Dustin Hoffman’s character, and at first it seemed that Emma Thompson’s character was going to find him as annoying as everyone else did. Instead, Ms Thompson turned Last Chance Harvey into the first true romantic adventure story, one that asks if two dented, middle-aged people who know even less about one another than we know about them (not much!) crazy to give love a try?

Kathleen had been asked to join us for the movie, but she would commit only to lunch at the Knickerbocker Bar & Grill. It was her first visit to this University Place landmark, which I didn’t even know about until late last summer. Kathleen put her finger on why I’m crazy about it: the Knickerbocker is “like Schrafft’s.”

After lunch, Kathleen and I caught a taxi, and, as we drove uptown, Kathleen asked about University Place. Where does it start and where does it end? I could have thought about this a minute and essayed an answer, but it would probably have been wrong, so I reached for Manhattan Block By Block, which I carry everywhere, and established that University Place runs from the northeast corner of Washington Square (continuing from Washington Square East) to the southwest corner of Union Square, where it runs into Broadway. Unfortunately, trying to read the map in the back of the cramped taxi not only made me carsick but unleashed the hangover that had, until now, hung fire. I was not to feel entirely well for the rest of the day.

In the evening, Ms NOLA and M le Neveu stopped by, on their way to see Milk, up in our part of town. Kathleen was napping, so they came back after the movie, and we all had a good chat. Our talk came round to Broadway shows. Kathleen proposed getting tickets for the four of us to see the revival of Guys and Dolls, starring, among others, Lauren Graham — as Miss Adelaide! How counterintuitive is that? And wasn’t the show revived just a few years ago? With Nathan Lane and Faith Prince?

How about 1992? No! We couldn’t believe it. Sixteen years ago? But Ms NOLA remembered: in Manhattan Murder Mystery, somebody goes to see Guys and Dolls, and a bit of Googling confirmed her recollection. It seems like only — well, not yesterday, exactly. But 2002, say. In 2002, however Mr Lane was enjoying the Broadway triumph of The Producers. Strangely, that seems to have happened longer ago. As Alan Rich wrote of Le Nozze di Figaro about a million years ago, in New York Magazine, Guys and Dolls, like the Catholic Mass, ought to be celebrated somewhere around the world at every moment.

(Speaking of Nathan Lane, we often say, of an actor whom we particularly like, “Oh, I’d go to see her in anything! I’d pay to see her read the phone book!” Our bluff is about to be called. Mr Lane, together with Bill Irwin, David Strathairn, and John Goodman, will be giving a revival of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot in the spring.)

I may be back on track, but, as is the case every January, there is more of me to get up to speed.

This evening, I found an hour, between an afternoon of reading and the preparation of dinner, for getting started on Christmas cards. The tardiness is not, I’m afraid, uncharacteristic. Although I like to send cards at the normal time (before Christmas), that’s just one of those good-behavior impulses that so often interfere with the spirit of things. Terrified of being tired of the Yuletide season before 25 December, I quite often don’t get into the Christmas spirit until the day itself. I take “the twelve days of Christmas” very seriously: they begin on the Nativity and end on my birthday, which is only as it should be.

There also seems to be a temporal chute that gets more greasedly accelerated every year. One minute, it’s Columbus Day (second Monday in October). The next, it’s Beethoven’s birthday (16 December), and I haven’t given a thought to Christmas. That is, I’ve given a lot of thought to not giving a thought to Christmas. On or around Beethoven’s birthday — the date on which, in my Radio Days, I allowed the announcers to start filling out the hours with Christmas carols — I start thinking about Christmas. In a ducking position, mostly.

Reading John Lukacs’s “autobiographical study” of George F Kennan a few weeks ago, I was keenly aware of something that Mr Lukacs wasn’t addressing. While he praised his subject for the untiring composition of position papers, speeches, essays, histories, and generally weighty (though digestibly well-written) texts, all I could think about was what Kennan didn’t have to think about, viz: the laundry, breakfast, shopping, dinner, the dusting, shopping, lunch, sending Christmas cards, and so on. Kennan was lucky enough — there really is no other word, from my vantage — to live in a time when men, especially thoughtful, intelligent men, were expected — expected — to stick to the important stuff. Mr Lukacs does not discuss Kennan’s hobbies, if any, but it’s clear that they were never allowed to interfere with the man’s self-prescribed duties, for the simple reason that he had no wish that would let them interfere. He liked to work. That’s commendable. That he never troubled himself with having the draperies dry-cleaned is not even worth mentioning. Mr Lukacs has undoubtedly been similarly lucky himself.

It’s important to stress that I feel no resentment about having to run a household. It is not work that I dislike. I thrill every time I watch Gosford Park, not because of the aristocratical shenanigans but because the housekeeper played by Helen Mirren knows how to manage the bedlinens. But I’m aware that such concerns cut into loftier pursuits. Now that I’ve come to a point in my life at which it seems that I have a lot to think about, and a lot to say about it (however interesting or not to others), I wouldn’t complain if Mrs Wilson were to materialize in our home. (Not that we could afford her!)

Kathleen, who has such tremendous powers of concentration that she can finish a piece of work only to discover that her body has been sounding fire alarms about hunger and whatnot that must “suddenly” be addressed with the utmost urgency, advises me to relax and focus on the things that I want to do. In modern psychological parlance, she’s trying to get me to give myself permission to put off washing the windows. Her powers of concentration being what they are, she could live in the murk of an abandoned fishtank without thinking about the difference that a bit of Windex and some elbow grease might make. And as for Christmas cards, let me just ask those of you on our mailing list if you’ve gotten one from her since the Seventies.

Surely there’s an nth law of thermodynamics that holds that there can be but one Kennan in any household.

The brouhaha about Rick Warren almost crushed me this evening. I thought I’d been stupid, and gone for the easy decision. Put up with the man — I’d argued — it’s only for one day. The thought that this might have been weak appeasement undid me. Then Kathleen got hold of my brain. If not Rick Warren, then who? Is there a better Christian out there, with anything like Rick Warren’s reach?

Comparing the current fight for gay rights to the still unfinished business of rights for African-Americans is doomed to founder on the rocks of bogusness. Excuse me, “category mistake.” African-Americans were deemed racially inferior according to nationalist, “racist” ideas about biological origins — starting about four hundred years ago. Those ideas ideas are simply ridiculous. Homosexuals are deemed wicked according to profoundly rooted ideas about God and virtue — starting who knows when but fully articulated well over a thousand years ago. See Augustine if you’re confused.

Although I’m tempted to argue that Jesus himself would have shrugged off encounters with homosexual behavior, I’m fairly sure that there’s no support for that view. And almost everyone else involved with the religion was emphatically homophobic. In those days, there were no blacks to look down upon (or so few it didn’t matter), but all the thinkers hated gays.

And have been hating them ever since. Racism is a comparative novelty, ipso facto easier to undermine. African-Americans are certainly not going to come to the older problem’s rescue — even if AIDS kills all the nice guys.

As Yvonne wrote the other day, we can return to our wonderful lives now, and find that they are, indeed, wonderful. We all get a prize for surviving — what? the Dubya years, all eight of ’em? How about the last forty, ever since Tricky Dick’s success with the “Southern Strategy“? With all due respect to Messrs Carter and Clinton, it is great to have a Democrat from the North in the offing.

In the middle of what was for the most part a crisp and lovely Sunday — autumn with the scent of winter, always refreshing ahead of time — I spent a fair amount of time arguing about what to do about “Detroit.” Here’s the vulgar wisdom: now that we’ve “bailed out” the bankers, let’s “bail out” the Big Three. In fact, the auto makers have a much greater claim on our generosity, because they employ millions of workers.

It’s as if the Soviet bloc’s command economy never existed. Red-blooded Americans advocate keeping a hopelessly moribund industry alive for the sake of payroll: the Trabant option.

I say: pension off the workers, no matter what it costs; I leave the details to policy wonks. Call it a one-time-only fix, a shame-on-you-America for having treated automobiles like sexual surrogates for sixty years. You can be sure of one thing, though: every red cent of the handout will recirculate in the retail economy, benefiting butchers, bakers, and  candlestick-makers. Not a dime will go into Swiss banking accounts — nor will more than a million or two, probably, find its way into whatever takes the place of hedge funds.

A propos of these draconian ideas, I suggest traveling back in time, all the way to 2003. That’s when I wrote (from what I can tell) a page at Portico about what already seemed to be the shaky future of GM et al. I was considering a book by an eminent reporter who is still on the automotive beat, Micheline Maynard. What still amazes me is that Ms Maynard’s account of auto-making in America at the Millennium could be so richly detailed where foreign concerns, especially Honda, were concerned, and yet so opaque about “Detroit.” It was as though, aside from marketers, the town were run by robots. While foreign manufacturers made cars, Detroit was into 4×4 vibrators. This link will take you straight to the beginning of the discussion, which follows a look at the Enron mess. Yes: that long ago!

Where did October go? It stole away beneath clouds of anxiety. Nothing personal, you understand. Just the usual, who’s driving this car? terror. Maybe it would help if I crouched down behind the front seat, bracing for the crash. Maybe it would help, if I were the sort of person who could do that. Instead, I’m the sort of person who is calmed down by reality, by seeing what’s actually going on in the world, and not in my head.

Even anxiety gets boring after a while, though, so I decided to do something about “things I’ve been meaning to do around the house.” We all have a little list of those. One thing that I’ve been meaning to do is to make some constructive use of the mini-studio that I bought from Hammacher Schlemmer a few months ago. The mini-studio allows you to take pictures like this: (more…)

When my aunt called, I said that Kathleen and I had just gotten back from One Day University. My aunt did not ask what One Day University was. She said, “Oh, I’d like to go to that so much!” — or enthusiastic words to that effect. It killed me (as if often does), that my aunt lives in New Hampshire, and not here in New York City. True, she lives in a deep pocket of high culture. Also, she is perfectly happy there, and has been for years. It’s entirely likely, by the way, that Il y a longtemps que je t’aime will show in a theatre nearby. Nearby her, in the middle of the Monadnock Mountains. She said as much when I told her how much I’d loved the movie, which I did in response to her faux question about Kristin Scott Thomas: “Have you seen your lover-girl yet?” My aunt knew that I had tickets to see The Seagull, but her eyes do not allow her to track my every burp on the Internet, so she could be excused for not knowing whether I’d seen the play. Like the hormonal teenager that, in fact, I never was at the time, I rushed right over the Broadway show to say that I’d seen the movie, “which opened yesterday!” As though my aunt might pin a medal on my chest for cultural diligence. Have I forgotten to tell you how crazy I am about my aunt? New York is the poorer for her absence. In my heart I am still about fourteen and she is in her early thirties. Octavian’s crush on the Marshallin was about half the size. But now I’m sixty — so I don’t stammer.

Ordinarily, when my aunt and I talk, we are both home alone, but today, having just got home from ODU, Kathleen was on the premises as well, so I put her on the phone. At some point, we asked if my aunt had heard a certain bit of news. She hadn’t. “But I’m completely desensitized,” she said, “to the communication skills of younger people” — by which she meant that younger people have no discernible communication skills. Kathleen said, “We were brought up very differently, weren’t we?” and for that instant my aunt and I belonged to the same generation. “We were indeed,” she said.

As usual, One Day University’s program consisted of four one-hour lectures. Three of the professors were very explicit about the pleasure of speaking to an audience familiar with such references as “Nixon,” “Glass-Steagall,” and the fact, that, once upon a time, there was only one phone company, and that you rented your telephone from this telephone company, which is why it always worked. Fear not: I am not going to launch into my “Prowst” lecture. That’s the one in which I indignantly demand that Dartmouth reimburse my aunt’s grandson (M le Neveu) for having failed to teach him how to pronounce a great French writer’s name. The anecdote on which this lecture is built never fails to shock the people to whom I tell it. They know that my cousin is brilliant, so it can’t be his fault. How did he get through one of the premier liberal arts colleges without so much as knowing that it’s “Proost”?

The last lecturer of the day — Barry Schwartz of Swarthmore — actually came out and said that he finds that today’s students don’t work as hard as their predecessors because they have so much more other stuff to figure out. The lecture began with a reminder of the world that most of the audience grew up in: When Mr Schwartz became an adult, the question wasn’t whether he’d get married, or whether he’d have children. The answers to those non-questions, both of them, was “As soon as possible.” The only genuine question was whom he’d marry — and he had the grace to point out that there was no question that this partner would be a woman. I suspect that Mr Schwartz and I would agree that, even if we were given all the options in the world, we’d still have been happy with the women who consented to marry us. But we were lucky. Lots of people were miserable when it came time to deal with the marriage question, and that’s why it’s a good thing that there are more choices today.

Which would mean that things are great if it weren’t for a slippage problem: undergraduates have to think about having sex. You could say, they’re allowed to have sex. Lord knows, we weren’t. “We were brought up very differently.” You might dream all the time about “scoring,” but it was just that, a dream. Meanwhile, you read your Shakespeare. And your Proust. You would not have known what to do with a hookup if the girl had knocked on your dormitory door. All right, you would have known. But only short-term: you’d have handled the matter like an Edwardian roué. The deeper connections would have been off-limits. And she, of course, would have been Germaine Greer. Rocket science.

When I was growing up, my aunt was the only adult I knew who had anything to say to me. She was beautiful, intelligent, romantic, and the mother of four children. (She is still all of these things.) I am sure that she had a great deal to do with my falling in love with Kathleen. By which I mean, not that I fell in love with Kathleen because she’s just like my aunt (although she sort of is), but because my aunt taught me what I might hope for in a partner. Without that example, I might have lived my life alone.

Instead of which, I haven’t lived the life of the prickly autodidact that I probably deserved.

The problem with my new weekend schedule — no work from Friday to Monday! (or at least until Sunday evening) — is that I get used to being away from the computer, away from the Internet, away from what is indisputably now my day job. My weekends, for the first time in about twenty years, are just like everyone else’s: short holidays that end with a downcast sigh. Do I have to? Do I have to go back to work?

And the answer for me is the same as it is for everybody else. Not for the same reasons, perhaps. Heaven knows I’m not putting food on the table by churning out the weekly reams. But the financial standpoint is the only one in which stopping what I’ve been doing at The Daily Blague would have any kind of explanation. People who know me would conclude that something was amiss, for I’m not the only one who thinks that blogging has made sense of my life, or at least given it a much-needed organizing structure. Nevertheless, the question loiters on my tongue: do I have to?

It may be that the momentary appeal of ongoing idleness stems from the crisis all around me. Never has the world seem so in danger of coming completely unstuck. I spent an hour or two this morning with “When Fortune Frowned: A special report on the world economy,” a tear-out collection of articles at the center of this week’s Economist. Partly I wanted to know what that newspaper’s sage heads made of the mess we’re in — and the chances of its getting worse — but, more than that, I wanted to see what, presumably, the financial community would be reading in its pages. This is a time when the very exclusiveness of The Economist — its considerable expense, its utter lack of interest in pop culture — make it invaluable. If The Economist is trying to sell magazines, it is going about the job invisibly.

Whatever the outcome of the credit crunch, and however long the apparently inevitable recession lasts, I have made up my mind about one thing: No citizen of any democracy to be heard speaking of him- or herself as a victim. We are all complicit in this disaster. We have elected the leaders who made it possible. I will hear no talk of Wall Street pirates. The boldest move on Wall Street in the past twenty years was Sandy Weill’s concoction of Citigroup, an assemblage of organizations that ought to have been illegal but that, because it was “so big,” and Washington — the people you’ve voted for if you’re a citizen of the United States (and could be bothered to vote) — was so craven, was instead ratified by Congress, by the repeal of the Glass-Steagall act, one of the cardinal safeguards of American finance. If the Congressman or Senator for whom you voted was actually opposed to the repeal of Glass-Steagall, you’re still not out of it, because neither you nor that representative managed to mount an effective opposition to Mr Weill’s bluff.

To speak of yourself as a victim of financial chicanery, of being obliged, as a “taxpayer,” to bail out a gang of greedy idiots, is to confuse our brave democracy with a sort of emporium, a department store in which, in exchange for your tax dollars, you get goods and services that are guaranteed to work (or your money back!). Anyone over ten who thinks of being an American in such consumerist terms doesn’t deserve democracy of any kind.

So you see I was not really taking the weekend off at all. Aside from the ominous economic backdrop, the weekend was delightful. (But in New York we are used to having the worst things happen on the loveliest days.) Back from her turnabout trip to London, Kathleen found that she’d actually gotten a lot of rest on the flights (as she rather enviably can) and was refreshed by meeting new people (her English partners, mostly) in new places (none of them more than a quarter of a mile distant from the Bank of England). She had breakfast with a South African client yesterday, and we had a nice dinner party in the evening. (Since I really hadn’t been busy at anything for more than a day, I was at the top of my game in the kitchen.) This afternoon, we strolled up Madison Avenue to Carnegie Hill for brunch, running into a couple of friends at the door of the restaurant that we’d chosen. They were leaving, so we caught up on the sidewalk. The husband made an excellent joke about the status of his 101(k).

After lunch, I bought a Perfex salt mill at Williams-Sonoma, stunned by sticker shock even though the price was no surprise at all. I can at least be confident that the thing will outlast me — a consideration of no small importance these days. When we got home, I continued catching up with magazines, because, even though I am “not working,” that is what I do on Sundays. I badly wanted to read The Maias instead, partly because Eça de Queirós’s romance is blossoming in the most lyrically menacing way, and partly because I’m wondering if I will ever actually finish his novel and live to read another. (Francine Prose’s Goldengrove, for instance.) But I was strong. I read, or at least started to read, an interview with Woody Allen in L’Express, a weekly that, because it’s shipped from France, costs even more than The Economist, and so is therefore even more obligatory reading. I don’t know why, exactly, but I wouldn’t expect Woody Allen to give an interview to an Anglophone publication in which he confessed that he set Vicky Cristina in Barcelona because the location would get him his financing, or that he had never seen Penélope Cruz in a film before Volver, because, in his opinion, her American films didn’t seem to be worth his time. He may think these things, but he doesn’t say them — not in English.

It seems almost new and different to return, this evening, to the care and feeding of the Daily Office — the daily Daily Blague entry in which I post provocative links, ie links that inspire me to bloviate. It’s different because I’ve just discovered the world beyond blogging. I won’t be abandoning The Daily Blague anytime soon, but I won’t be feeling guilty for not writing “bloggy” entries, whatever that means. Because, as I discovered today, the fun part of the Blogosphere has moved on, to Facebook.

I did not sign up for Facebook in an idle moment. I happened to notice, on my WordPress “dashboard,” that the DB had received an incoming link from “Jahsonic.” Really! Exploring a bit, I came across this post. If you scroll down, you’ll find that the author of Jahsonic, Jan Geerinck, a gentleman in Antwerp, cites the DB as authority for the proposition that the old tale about the lady who hides her lover in a tub, launched by Apuleius and picked up by Boccaccio, provides the basis for Ravel’s highly but dryly entertaining one-act opera, L’heure espagnole. Wow!

This is why I don’t try to edit Wikipedia entries. I send them $10 a month, not my emendations. I would lose faith in Wikipedia altogether if I thought that the reference I was checking out might have been written by me. My attribution of Ravel’s plot is just the sort of armchair scholarship that I’m trying to purge from my system. Nevertheless, I stand by the assertion, at least for the time being. The important thing was to thank Mr Geerinck.

The problem was that I could do so in one of only two ways. I could post a comment, or I could contact him at Facebook. Posting a comment seemed a little vainglorious, or, what I call Tooting Bec. A Facebook contact would require me to sign up.

I’d been meaning to create a Facebook account. I’d been advised to do so — buy an adviser whom I pay! But whenever I thought of it, I saw myself as a dirty old man showing up at a middle-school sock hop. What’s he doing here? Well, that’s not what happened.

What happened was that, in the space of a day, I went from 0 to 29 friends, almost all of whom I know, but many of whom I’ve been out of touch with. A few people, I knew of. Wow! They confirmed our friendship? I do have to write to my rheumatologist at the Hospital for Special Surgery. I did not mean to ask him to be my friend. I think the world of Dr Magid, but I insist on maintaining a few shreds of our professional relationship. He is the doctor, and I am the patient. On the other hand, he does always ask what I’ve been reading. Maybe I ought to send him to Goodreads.

It’s not that I regard every one of my Facebook friends as friends. I’m not going to be asking anybody to help me paint the apartment. I take a very serious, French view of friendship: it includes one or two people outside your family plus everybody in your lycée class.

Speaking of friendship, Fossil Darling was complaining that Wells Fargo had “stolen” the Wachovia takeover from Citigroup. I told him that he has obviously been Drinking the Kool-Aid; in a year or less, I assured him, he’ll be thanking his lucky stars that Citi’s deal fell through. Then, yesterday, up at his health club in Luxury Haven, he ran into a Citi broker who “used to work with a lot of people at Wachovia.” Libel laws being what they are, I shan’t repeat what Fossil repeated, but I can tell you that the broker’s comments were highly uncomplimentary as to character and fitness. What a good thing it was, he thought, that Citi wouldn’t be trying to swallow the Charlotte bank. “That is so amazing!” replied Fossil. “My dearest friend has been telling me the same thing, and he’s not even in the business!”

“So,” I asked, “who’s your dearest friend?”

Needless to say, Fossil Darling will be the very last man to sign up at Facebook before the rule against perpetuities expires.

As if nothing else were going on, last Friday afternoon, the phones at the apartment went dead. I found this out from an email that Kathleen sent, after failing to get through. I had a minor meltdown. When the power or the water or the cable don’t work, I know that it’s not just me. But our landline phone service is fragile for several reasons, almost all of them having to do with the age of the building. In 1963, you might have two phones in a house, one in the kitchen and one somewhere else. You might have a third phone on a bedside table. We have seven phones — three in the bedroom alone — on two lines, and those two lines are jury-rigged (by the phone company) out of one. Only two of phones, moreover, run without extra electric power. A problem with any one of the units can knock out service. So can a loose jack. And if the problem occurs within the apartment’s wiring, anywhere beyond the phone company’s junction box, then we’ll have to pay to fix it.

Kathleen was wonderful. She took a moment (a long moment) from helping out with some bits and pieces of the aftermath of the credit collapse to contact Verizon. They told her that the outage affected “the area.” That was the good news. The bad news is that it would be repaired by Tuesday evening. I was so relieved by the good news — it wasn’t us! there was nothing that I could do about it! — that the bad news didn’t register until shortly before it was mooted, and phone service was restored.

We never did find out what “the area” comprised. Some tenants in the building reported uninterrupted service. The liquor store, across the street, took the vino order that I placed for vino, using the cell phone. (Like most people in their sixties, I hate everything about cell phones except their convenience. They’re pretty unendurable products, as “utilities” go.)

The news about the phones came just as I was settling down to put the afternoon to use. I’d been to the movies, and I’d made myself a sandwich for lunch, actually measuring out one ounce of potato chips. (Saturdays and Sundays not included!) I am trying to make Fridays my menus plaisirs afternoon. That’s a joke; the more correct French term would be paperasse. This site defines paperasse as “papiers san valeur” — papers without value. That’s just what having paperasse means: turning receipts and notes into rubbish by entering information on a computer. You’ll have to agree that anything in French sugars the pill that would be hard to swallow as “data entry.”

But I was already too unsettled by the news. My feverish imagination, which is more or less permanently set on “wingnut putsch” alert, was quick to crochet dire prognostics from the financial meltdown, John McCain’s dithering about the debate, and a rather too party-linish comment by Barney Frank about House Republicans. Congressman Frank turned out to be speaking the truth, but in such a way that only made the House Republicans seem even more seditious than they already are. (Happily, they’re not sure of just whom they aim to subvert.) And, on top of that, I was giving a little dinner party.

Well, an old friend whom we hadn’t seen in a while was coming to dinner, because I’d asked him, on the spur of the moment, the night before — when it was still the night before, and it was still possible to think of “throwing something together” as a larky pastime. In the event, this repast saved my bacon. Shoving Big Ideas out of my way, I concentrated on the orderly production of a meal. Have I already mentioned that Friday is our night for home-made fried food? That’s because I dust and vacuum on Saturday, elimination most of the aerosols that linger whenever fat has been brought to three hundred seventy-five degrees. I was so well organized, however, that I managed to set up the deep fryer out on the balcony.

Our friend is a fan of my fried chicken, so there were no leftovers. He’s also a fan of my cornbread, which is curious, because I rarely use the second cornbread recipe twice, and, even when I do, I throw in little bits of tasty leftovers. On Friday, I threw two breakfast sausages that Kathleen had virtuously left on her plate after breakfast a few days earlier (okay, Saturday; but sausages age well once they’ve been cooked). Also a few gratings of Cabot’s Monterey Jack with Jalapeños. What we had a lot of afterward was Caesar salad; I’d forgotten that our friend doesn’t eat salad.

We did listen to a bit of the debate, while waiting for Kathleen to come home. I certainly hope that Mr Obama wins, but I want to report that, because I can listen to John McCain without wincing, the silliness of most of what he said didn’t bother me so much. When the angels ask me to recall the hardest thing of all, I’ll tell them it was watching Alfred E Bush run for President. I still can’t believe it happened. I can’t even be shocked that he won.

I’ll be having another dinner party this evening. I don’t really know who’s coming, though. Ms NOLA, for sure. Kathleen, if she can. The newlyweds if it fits in with their plans — they’ve got something musical to go to later in the evening. It is probably incorrect to speak of dinner parties here, since everyone who’ll have shown up is family or the next thing to it.

The weather this morning was beautiful: clear, crisp, sunny, and inviting. High atmospheric pressure cheered one into standing up and getting going. That’s how Fall is in the Northeast: we snap out of the stupor of August (and early September!) and remember how many interesting things there are in the world. It’s a seasonal response conditioned, long ago, by the promises of new courses, new teachers — and another chance to be a better-organized student.

Making breakfast this morning, I slipped the first disc of the first season of The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show into the kitchen television. (By far the most-watched screen in the house, it is unconnected to the outside world). What enormous fun this show still is! The nation trembles as an invasion of Moon Men impends (of course it’s just Rocky and Bullwinkle). An announcer advises listeners to panic: “This is not a play,” a sweet reference (considering the age of the target audience) to Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds hoax twenty-one years earlier. Meanwhile, two straphangers discuss the situation. The most surprising thing about the show is its presumption that everyone lives in New York City: subways don’t require explanation. Neither does the tone of the discussion. “So, what else is new?” shrugs one of the men. When genuine Moon Men arrive — largely to thwart the onslaught of lunar tourism — Rocky asks Bullwinkle if he’s ever seen such strange creatures. Bullwinkle shrugs: “Maybe they’re Congressmen.” With Rocky and Bullwinkle, the noble Warner Bros tradition of aiming adult humor over the heads of innocent children, nurtured in California, came back home to Brooklyn. (more…)

 

A touch of fall in the air last week tempted me to trundle the portable room air-conditioner off into the closet, but I wasn’t so foolish. One shiver does not an autumn make. This mid-September weekend has come straight out of summer. At the market today, I noticed a lot of very cross women, complaining about the heat to their cell phones. Walking home, I took my time and stuck to the shady side of the street, but I was dripping when I got home. Sitting down in the chilled blue room, with a fan to boot, will probably undo my defenses to Kathleen’s cold, which has kept her very quiet since Thursday evening.

LXIV accompanied me to the movies on Friday morning. I almost canceled, because New Yorker Festival tickets went on sale at noon, but in the end I decided to give the Festival a pass, for the second year. I liked going for the first few years, but I overdid it in 2006, and felt rather like a groupie-in-training. I have never understood the reading part of author readings. Many writers are no good at all at reading their own work, while others — I’m thinking of Gary Shteyngart here — are so vivid and entertaining that you wonder if their books aren’t simply scripts for great performances. Discussions are find, but what I like most are Q & A sessions. I’ll ask a question if I can think of a good one, but I like watching writers speak ex tempore. And then there’s the signing at the end. That’s a feature that the New Yorker Festival events omit.

Ms NOLA called me last night with the news of David Foster Wallace’s suicide. I liked the man’s non-fiction very much, but I never even tried to read Infinite Jest. I will miss his voice, which was both very funny and very learned. Considering the state of the union today, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that he was finding it difficult to be funny and learned these days. As we slip into something like a shogunate, with Republican Party pooh-bahs manipulating elected officials in the exploitation of the res publica, we have a greater need than ever for critics who are learned and funny. (I don’t know what Wallace’s politics were, but his teaching post at Claremont College in Pomona suggests that he was not a radical leftist.)

Yielding to more purely personal trends, I decided to stop writing up Friday movies in time for Saturday publication. I want the weekends for myself, and the weekend begins when the Friday morning movie lets out. “For myself” means “for reading.” Instead of writing up Burn After Reading on Friday afternoon, I read Home, Marilynne Robinson’s radiant concurrence to Gilead. When I finished the book last night, it was a good thing to have a box of Kleenex by my chair. Tears flooded my eyes the moment they weren’t required for reading.

The only important news, as I write toward the end of the Labor Day weekend — and how nice that it’s good news all round — is that New Orleans has declined to give an assist to the body-blowed Republican Party by succumbing to Gustav. The only succumbing that Americans are interested in at the moment occurred some time ago in the family of Alaskans by the name of Palin. (more…)

On Friday afternoon, as I was hunkered down in the kitchen preparing not one but two dinners — Megan and Ryan would be coming that evening; an old friend of Kathleen’s on Saturday — I had to admit that it had been too long since my last serious dinner. For one thing, I had no idea where the gelatine was, and without gelatine I could not make the raspberry charlotte that appeared on the cover of Saveur several years ago. looking utterly luscious. (I’d made it twice before). So I had to go downstairs to buy some, and it was on this errand that I re-thought my plans. I would prepare that night’s menu the next night, and make something simple instead. In addition to the gelatine, I bought chicken, new potatoes, and corn. In the fridge at home, I had a rib steak and a sugar baby (a spherical, seedless watermelon). I was set.

In keeping with this ruder fare, I laid the table on the balcony, not the one in the living room. The weather was perfect! Megan and Ryan arrived about fifteen minutes early, before I’d had a chance to change clothes but after I’d cleaned up after a major screw-up. Into a four-cup measure, I poured the milk for a cornbread recipe, broke in the eggs, and then attempted to beat these ingredients with an electric eggbeater. The measuruing cup was nowhere near large enough to contain the instant surge. Milk and egg flew all over the counter and dripped down the front of the dishwasher into a puddle.

As I say, I’d put this disaster behind me by the time the newlyweds walked in. Not only had I cleaned it up and put the cornbread batter into the oven, but I’d stopped screaming at myself. It was as though I were yelling at someone else. “I can’t believe what an idiot you are!” — expletive-laden variations on that tune. “Even a five year-old would have known better!” It really did make me feel better, if only by occupying my mind while my hands bent to the drudgery of wiping up one of the two things that you don’t want to drop on a kitchen floor, eggs and oil.

By five o’clock on Saturday afternoon, I’d tidied the apartment as usual, and also whipped up some beet borscht for dinner. I’d begun to set the table. And I’d started to feel very sorry for myself. All I wanted to do was to curl up with Dostoevsky’s Demons. Kathleen suggested that we make a reservation at a local restaurant, but I was too conscious of the expensive tenderloin that I already hadn’t done anything with the night before. So I pushed on grimly. Once I’d finished setting the table, I felt much better. I saw that there was nothing to do but sauté the beef and wait for the sauce — a combination of wine, stock and cream — to boil down, so that I could stir in some Roquefort cheese.

This morning, I woke up resolved to have breakfast at the coffee shop across the street, but I changed my mind an hour or so later, when I divined that Kathleen really needed to stay in bed. After two rather vinous evenings, my head was far from clear, but perhaps that was for the best. I may have forgotten where the gelatine was, but my hands knew how to load the dishwasher, make coffee, and sizzle some sausages. (I was even up to squeezing a bagful of oranges.)

If I weren’t so tired — as it happens, I’m overdue for a B-12 shot (my gut doesn’t absorb this essential vitamin) — I’d be in the kitchen now, consolidating the weekend’s experiences, or at least cleaning the refrigerator. I am still looking for what I call my blogger’s kitchen — an ideal place that holds nothing but what’s needed to make the next meal. If you know a sorcerer who can arrange such a marvel, please let me know.

Like a lot of Upper East Siders who are members of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I feel lucky to have such an amazing art collection at my doorstep. Every once in a while, though, it hits me, with a palooka punch, that I have an amazing art collection at my doorstep, one that I can walk into as often as I want to, at no additional charge; one that I’m familiar enough with that I can navigate through it without getting lost or wondering where the things that I like to look at are kept.

It isn’t Schadenfreude, exactly, but when I think that most visitors have to make the most of their time in the Museum, be it an entire day, before heading back to wherever — “wherever” being considerably farther away than a twenty-minute stroll — I’m humbled and elated at the same time. I’ve been told that I’m privileged since I was old enough to understand English, and exhorted to act worthily. But it becomes harder and harder to imagine going to the Museum as a duty.

I went on Friday morning, not because I was burning to see anything but because I had a bunch of errands on Madison Avenue, and because I like the Museum’s cafeteria. (I like all of the Museum’s eateries, but I especially appreciate the cafeteria, because it realizes the Platonic Idea of what we all had to put up with in school; as in heaven, the unpleasant bits have been swept away. The burgers and fries are tasty, not greasy, but still disreputable enough to relish.) I did have a few Museum-specific objectives. The Times had run a quiz of sorts, that morning, featuring animals in blown-up detail from various things in the Museum, and I wanted to see if I could find the greyhound — which I did, but not in the Robert Lehman collection, where I looked first, but in the Old Master galleries: St Dominic raising somebody from the dead, by Bartolomeo degli Erri. And then there was the question of the Rembrandtine mustache. A friend had written of seeing a man dressed in black who sported a “Rembrandtine mustache.” What might that be, I wondered. The answer was more elusive than degli Erri’s greyhound. The only mustache that looked “Rembrandtine” belonged to a face by Frans Hals.

I went to the Museum again this morning. This time, it was to make sure that Kathleen saw the three interesting shows currently on exhibit: Turner, pietre dure, and the great photography show, “Framing A Century.” The last was a big hit. Pietre dure didn’t do anything for Kathleen; although impressed by the technique of hardstone mosaic, she was not moved by any of the pieces. (But she did think that the lithothèque was cool [it truly is], and she liked the shells console.) She wasn’t in the mood for Turner, either. But she loved the photographs. She couldn’t get over how good the older prints look, even after a hundred and fifty years, and the rich intonation of their details. Looking at the photographs through Kathleen’s eyes, I couldn’t get over how good the prints look, either. And I noticed, for the first time, that Roger Fenton’s Roslin Chapel, South Porch (1856) — a picture I can’t get enough of — is not a small print.

Then we came home. We had had breakfast right before, and I made BLTs for lunch shortly after we got back. Kathleen smiled with the delight of feeling “virtuous: it’s early afternoon still and I’ve already done something important.”

If she could only go as often as I do, it wouldn’t seem so important. It might begin to feel as though we were living in a very large apartment.

I had the most awful sensation the other night, but I think that I ought to get used to it. I was, it seemed — I am — just another craggy, middle-aged man with a lot of strong opinions. I can argue the opinions well enough, but, let’s face it, who cares? And who doesn’t wish that, regardless of the evident world-historical acuity of my pronouncements, I’d just shut up? I’m another one of those bearded autodidacts who make it impossible for this country to settle down.

Seeing myself as just another guy with “brains” was truly unpleasant. And that, I guess, is the beginning of another conversation.

It’s taking a while to get back down to earth. I’m still spinning in Mad Men orbit, having watched the new season’s second episode twice, something that I haven’t done since the show’s introduction last year. I’m glad that I did, because I caught a lot of things that I didn’t quite get the first time around. That’s partly because the volume was a little too low, and partly because I was trying to decide on what to do about dinner — at ten o’clock! I was also a bit twitchy about recording the show so that Kathleen can see it when she gets back from Maine. (more…)