The recently-closed restaurant branch of one of my favorite food shops. I’m sorry that they didn’t make a go of it, but I never gave it a try, either. I’d say that it was in the wrong part of town. It would have been heaven in or near the theatre district. Or perhaps in Grand Central Terminal.

The weather today suits my indoorsy, stock-taking frame of mind. Without the slightest intention of cutting back on my posting, I’m considering changes. Metamorphoses, perhaps. It’s as though the sheer weight of the blog’s verbiage were altering the site’s nature, its composition.

Ordinarily, I don’t like to write about blogging — I’d rather just do it. But lately I’ve felt the need for some public throat-clearing. The fundamental nature of the enterprise hasn’t changed; The Daily Blague is still a combination diary and notice board, pointing on occasion to longer, less dated essays at Portico. If I’ve offering very few links to the rest of the Blogosphere, that’s because I haven’t really been visiting very much of it beyond the sites listed on the Blog Roster.

But the whole point of the blog seems about to tilt in some new direction. Literally — think of it as the vanishing point, the dot in the distance where all the sight lines converge. I’ve been looking for a new pole star. I haven’t found it yet, but of course I don’t have to, since I’ll be inventing it along with everything else.

This may surprise you, but assisting spring fever as a catalyst are the Diaries of Monty Python veteran Michael Palin, which I’m listening to on my daily walks (as read by the author). I can’t tell you how much I should like to shake this gentleman’s hand! Creator of many of my favorite Python routines (together with Terry Jones, whom I hadn’t properly appreciated), Mr Palin comes off as a charming but thoroughly decent man, with his feet on the ground, his heart in the right place, and his head stocked to bursting with articulate expression. It would be an exaggeration to say that the Diaries take one into his workroom, but they do give off the most invigorating fizz. (more…)

The Famille Verte was bothered last evening by two questions: (a) how to convince friends and relations to plow through George Meredith’s fabulous but unreadable novel, The Egoist, which really, really needs to be turned into a movie; and (b) if Mozart didn’t write K 297(b), who did? Stand up, man; take a bow! Let’s hear it for the greatest forger in music history.

And that, my friends, is what comes of Giving Up Television: one loses touch entirely. But we do have a very jolly time.

Later that night….

Listening to Berlioz (Les nuits d’été — Régine Crespin). Is it really possible to be this old?

I notice lately that, when I twist my arm a bit, the skin folds like rope, torquing from wrist to elbow. It’s not awful looking, but it is awful. Sixty!

My youth was so completely (and obviously) wasted on me that I resolved not to wail about it when I grew up/old. So I won’t. But to be sixty is truly arresting. To say that I don’t feel sixty is a very bad joke, especially as I did feel fifty-five, -six, -seven, &c more or less uninterruptedly. Sixty! How breathtakingly pénible!

Because I’ve never been a bigger flirt than I am now. It’s not that I expect my flirting to lead to anything – Dieu m’en garde! But I don’t want my flirting to be ridiculous, now that I know, finally, why one would flirt.

Sixty! Que mon sort est amer!

Connaissez-vous la blanche tombe? Good — meet me there at six for a drink.

The view from the back surgeon’s waiting room would be far more agreeable if it were not disturbed by the sound of a television placed next to the window. The sight of a television in a doctor’s waiting room makes me wonder if this is really a world that I want to go on living in. Nobody looks good in a waiting room, but television is a further insult.

¶ Follow-Up Visit.

A favorite bookshop — where all encounters are pleasant.

At some point yesterday, before I’d gone out, Kathleen complained that her cell phone battery wasn’t charging. I must have been in very good form, because I knew right away why. I remembered that she was using an ailing battery of mine that I’d replaced some time ago. I’d replaced mine, all right, but I’d forgotten to buy a second battery to replace hers, which was downright unusable.

Big deal, you say: why didn’t you just go back and buy the second battery? If you’re really asking this, you don’t own a cell phone. When I replaced my battery, I was careful to show up at exactly ten o’clock, when the AT & T Mobility (formerly Cingular) shop opened for business. All I can say about showing up later than ten o’clock is that it’s a pity that Dante didn’t live to exercise his taste for the lurid on waspish descriptions of cell phone stores. They’re all the same, their staffs grossly underpaid in order to maximize the compensation of officers and directors (so often the same people), and one fine day we shall round up the phone company executives en masse — they’ll be huddled together at the Masters in Augusta — and wheel them off to the guillotine. In the meantime, we must rely on our little grey cells — the ones in our head.

Here it was, the middle of the afternoon, and Kathleen was suggesting that I just “run in” and pick up a battery. In this weather, she opined, there would be no one there. Ha! I thought. I’ll go, I promised, at ten tomorrow morning.

But then another snafu altogether intervened. New York’s only surviving drug store — hey, free markets are great! — runs an automated telephone prescription refill system that, for the first time, pooped out on us. I okayed the the refills last week, but when I showed up at the counter I was told that no one had requested them. This might have been a nightmare, but it wasn’t; my clear and concise response to the pharmacist’s questions, edged perhaps with a touch of irritation but no more, convinced her that I was not a flake and that “the computer” had probably screwed things up. I was told that the pills would be ready in an hour. All of a sudden, I had time to kill.

Why not spend it at AT & T Mobility? Favorably buzzed by my red-tape-slashing experience with the Duane Reade pharmacist, I crossed the street and walked up the block. Contrary to Kathleen’s prediction, the AT & T Mobility store was not empty. But it wasn’t packed, either. A young woman with a clipboard, wishing to be far more pleasant than her stress levels permitted, asked how she could help me. It was not a genuine question. She was going to inscribe my name on her clipboard and ask me to take a seat. But I was ready for that. All I want to do, I said, is buy a couple of batteries for my Razr phone. My slightly too-bright smile implied a reminder that there was nothing to negotiate. I wasn’t going to mull over the pricing of plans, seek instructions about setting up my voice-messaging service, or claim that my phone had been stolen by brigands in Provence. I was going to pay for two batteries. Will there be a wait? I asked. I really shouldn’t have to wait, I said, because all I want to do is buy two batteries. If there’s going to be a wait, I’ll come back tomorrow at ten, I said. I was cheerful but very articulate. The very large gent in a dark suit whose aim was central-casting impassivity couldn’t help eyeing me with a warning frown, beneath which I detected a certain anxiety. He was dealing with a customer who was Prepared.

Impressed by the simplicity of my proposed transaction, and mad to get rid of me, the girl with the clipboard went overboard, and suggested that I might find the batteries that I wanted on the racks that lined the store’s walls. But I was ready for that, too. I knew that Razr phone batteries are not stocked on open racks, available to the public. They must be retrieved from the cabinets behind the racks — cabinets that a big guy like me would get in no end of trouble for trying to help himself to. Having expressed my doubt that the batteries were so readily available, I smiled brightly once again. This smile is a trick that I learned from matrons from both Westchester and Harris Counties, and it is even more effective when the smiler stands, even in his dotage, nearly two hundred centimeters tall, carries an Edwardian portliness, and dresses as well as the ladies who taught him. I was directed forthwith to a clerk behind the counter. My tactics were working. I had convinced the staff that there was an easy way to be done with me. Just sell me the batteries…

I wish you could have seen the clerk as he hunted and gathered for product. He found one battery soon enough, but he had to check two or three more cabinets before he located a second. I was ready for him to tell me that stock was running low at the moment and that I’d have to come back for a second battery. But no; after zigging and zagging across the floor, he returned to the desk with two batteries. You said “two,” right? he thought to ask. My reply involved sound, but no moving parts.

It was at this point that I realized that I had walked into the diorama of an early Twenty-First Century cell phone store. Nobody — aside from me, the girl with the clipboard, and the clerk who unearthed the batteries — had moved more than, say, the background figures in a cheap animated film. As I ran my credit card through the doodad with the screen that, in theory, requires your authorized signature, I noticed that the other clumps of people at the counter were still exactly as they had been before the clerk went hunting, while less engaged customers perused the goods that were available on the open racks with a bemused paralysis more typically brought on by the parade of wallpaper samples. The big guy in the suit, needless to say, merely breathed.

Back at Duane Reade, the new clerk, flustered, couldn’t find the refills. The dithering would have gone on indefinitely if the pharmacist hadn’t looked up from her break and intoned, “they’re ready,” in a voice that all but cast a spotlight on the elusive prescriptions. All it takes in this world, it seems, is sounding like someone who knows whereof he or she speaks.

Yesterday, snow. Today, meltage. I’ve got to run across the street to pick up some prescriptions for Kathleen, and I’m not bothering to change into trousers.

When I get back, there will be no excuse for further delay: it’s time to open the box from TigerDirect and see if the Wi-Fi booster accomplishes anything in my plastered pad.

Here we are on our way to dinner at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Terminal, at the end of a long day. Because of the terrible weather (snow, slush, ice, all served up nice and cold), we progressed from the Museum of Modern Art, where Kathleen’s law firm hosted a fête this evening, to Grand Central via the subway, which took forever but was dry and comfortable. Consider the alternative:

At one point at the party, to get Kathleen’s attention from a balcony, I tossed a crumpled Kleenex in her general direction, and it worked. The gesture wasn’t as stylish as Cary Grant’s tossing of the matchbook in North By Northwest, but I felt that I’d pulled something off, and sometimes that’s all that it takes to plumb the heights of contentment. Please don’t think that I just got lucky! A lifetime of disrupting classrooms — or at least one of distracting them behind teachers’ backs — has left me with a distinctive skill set. I may not know much about art, but I know how to pitch a tissue.

Kathleen asked me what I was giving her for Valentine’s Day, and I thought, oh, that’s next week sometime, isn’t it? “A kiss,” I answered.

At the Oyster Bar: Kate, Headwaiter, Kathleen, Tank. Guastavino ceilings, natch.

English really is the most amazingly flexible language. You can take a word and, if you will only think hard enough, come up with an entirely new meaning for it that also makes sense! The Washington Post runs a contest, or at least so says this Web page. I’d be more scrupulous about getting to the bottom of it, but I am simply blown away by the perfection of:

Oyster (n.), a person who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddish expressions.

That, mes amis, is a keeper. (Thanks, LXIV!)

Throwing a baby shower for women only is currently unconstitutional in Manhattan. So, when the parents and in-laws of a former associate of Kathleen’s gave the couple a baby shower, at a multicameral West Side eatery, I was expected to show up. This was something of a hardship, because, even in the absence of a rock band, conversation at such an event is almost impossible. Even with men on hand, a baby shower brings out the side of women that Lerner & Loew’s Henry Higgins complains about. (Discretion forbids me to elaborate.)

There was, for example, a game of Bingo. The squares on the cards were filled out with items from the baby shower registry, and players were to check them off as gifts were opened. The trouble was, the men opening the presents weren’t always sure of what they’d just unwrapped, and a few items, such as “baby fingernail clipper,” were not contemplated by the designers of the cards. There was much discussion about whether “baby keys” and “rattle” were identical, until I pointed out that both items appeared on my card. The prize was the centerpiece on each table: a large piggy-bank in the form of a baby bottle, filled with pink jelly beans. When no one seemed to have pencils for the Bingo, I suggested that we use the few remaining jelly beans that, having been scattered in drifts on each table, still remained uneaten. Pencils were produced forthwith.

Kathleen dashed off after her starter bowl of soup. Poof! She was gone. And, with her, any chance of making a graceful early exit. I wasn’t having a bad time, but there were all sorts of things that I wanted to be doing at any home — an excuse that, shared as it was by every man in the room, including, I’ve no doubt, the expectant father, was therefore too lame to venture. I knew most of the people I was seated with, although the most interesting topic — Kathleen’s Shocking True Stories of Mad & Deranged Clients — was obviously off limits. I sat back and ate my lunch like a good boy.

The one thing that I didn’t have to worry about was an event that never ended. From the moment we arrived, it was clear that the party was “running late.” Shortly past four — not bad at all, really — I was out on the street, walking past the Dakota toward the Park.

Three of the many beasties guarding the perimeter of the Dakota. Alas, they didn’t protect John Lennon.

There had been snow during dessert, but the sky was clearing when the shower broke up. Once I was inside the Park, however, it began to snow again, and as I made my way along the sad little service road that runs between the 86th Street transverse and the reservoir, I found myself in a momentary blizzard. It was also very chilly. I had to put my gloved hands in my coat pockets to stop the shooting pains of cold. By the time I reached Fifth Avenue, the show had given up blowing from all four corners of the compass, and the sky was clear again, with sunlight warming the higher reaches of taller buildings. 

To make for a perfect happy ending, the other elevator was working when I got home. But let’s not go into that. 

An old stairway at the Metropolitan Museum of Art — an outcrop of the buried original.

This afternoon, not having been in a while, I walked over to the museum. It was agreeably underpopulated for some reason, although there were still plenty of small knots of people stopping in the middle of the traffic, unaware that New York pedestrians follow rules of the road. If you want to stop and get your bearings, you pull over. Oy.

As I was on my way to see my favorite picture, only to find that it’s out on loan for a while, I reflected that, much as I love to meet people at the museum, I prefer to go through the galleries by myself, because that’s the only way to rule out talking. If it were up to me, the museum would be as silent as a church in a pentitential season. I have overheard a lot of claptrap at the museum, some of it uttered by myself, but never anything worth attending to.

The great name of Andre Meyer has been retired, it seems, and the galleries of Nineteenth-Century European art that used to bear his name have been tweaked, expanded, and partially renamed. The change is a great improvement, if for no other reason than the sensible incorporation of a great deal of American and Twentieth-Century art that belongs alongside the impressionist, pre-, and post- pictures that were already there. For example, Sargent’s Madame X, formerly rather hard to find, tucked away in the American Wing, now commands the best spot in the house, and can be seen for miles, which is just as it should be, since everybody wants to see her. Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein is very much at home a room or two away. I am not entirely sure about the installation of an Art-Nouveau dining room from a house near the Place de l’Étoile; it’s very handsome, but surely it belongs among the exhibits of decorative arts on the ground floor. A quibble.

There’s a nice little show of drawings and etchings in the Johnson Gallery (that corridor that connects the top of the grand staircase with the lobby of the old Andre Meyer galleries), a pendant to the soon-to-open Poussin and Nature. My favorite is a drawing by Donato Creti — no, I hadn’t heard of him, either — “Bathers in a Woodland Landscape.” You’d miss the bathers if it weren’t for the title; they’re lost among the tree trunks in the background. The only clear figure is that of a gentlemanly rustic drying himself off on a rock. The whole scene is shot with the bright peace — and even the fragrance — of a summer afternoon in the woods.

Two other nice works: an etching by Joseph Rebell (d 1826) that, with its pale, distant bluff, roundly prefigures the Hudson River School (which isn’t saying as much as that might sound, since the HRS is mightily retrospective); and an anonymous Seventeenth-Century French drawing of some architectural ruins that strongly suggest the Met in a makeover for one of those apocalyptic movies going round these days. I’d have bought the catalogue, but of course there wasn’t one; there never is for this sort of show, drawn entirely from the Museum’s collection.

Portrait of the author in despair, wondering what he will tell his wife about having watched further episodes of Lewis.

Over the weekend, George Snyder (1904) sent me the link to a video clip from Baisers Volés, François Truffaut’s 1968 continuation of the autobiography of Antoine Doinel. It’s a film that I hadn’t seen (oy). In the clip, Antoine (Jean-Pierre Léaud) opens a letter, concerning the difference between politeness and tact, left at his doorstep, and we hear the voice of his boss’s wife (Delphine Seyrig) read it. After hazarding a reply (cunningly shown being posted via pneumatique), Antoine gets into bed (shown). Seyrig was a gorgeous blonde with a well-deployed whisper of a voice, and George was quite right to be bowled over by it.

So I rented the movie. Stolen Kisses to you, bub. I rented it on Sunday, after dinner at an ordinarily-packed restaurant denuded by the Super Bowl. 

Which meant that I had to watch it yesterday afternoon or pay extra. This is always happening with rented foreign films. I can never interest Kathleen in watching them because, at least at home, she doesn’t want to read subtitles. (Given the amount of time that she spends poring over legal boilerplate, I don’t blame her.) The days go by — and I find myself watching a movie when I’d rather be writing. “Roger, pay the two dollars.” But I can’t. I’ve got to watch the damned movie and get it back to the Video Room.

All of which is meant to console George for not finding Baisers Volés at Netflix. Life is rough even when the rental place is two doors down, and you just walk in and ask, and okay okay.

That ought to have been enough video for one day. But Kathleen was working late, so I ordered in. I might have read while I ate. But I wanted to watch something. There were lots of things to watch, including the newly-acquired video of A Dance to the Music of Time. But no.

You see, I’d been on a Morse jag, watching one Inspector Morse episode after another.

Isn’t it a pity, I said the other night, that they only made a pilot of Lewis — a continuation of Morse, sort of, in which it was now the North Country former-sergeant Lewis who had a Morse-like gent working for him. Isn’t it a pity, I said.

Yes! affirmed Kathleen. I like Lewis!

But we were wrong about their not proceeding beyond the pilot, and the box from Amazuke arrived today. Could I wait? More anon.

I love my Coolpix. The pictures that it takes without a flash are astonishing. The view from our balcony, this seventh morning of February.

Snow, finally. Living in the city, with no need for a car, I never look at weather reports, so I have no idea how much snow is expected — and don’t you go telling me! When I want to know if it’s raining, I glance at the cupola of St Joseph’s (shown above) to check for streaks of wet. As Akira Kurosawa observed, you can’t see real rain.

How about those Mets? Oh! right! It’s all good! My son-in-law-elect is a a big Giants fan, so I’m taking the victory as personally auspicious.

My infidelities continue astound me; I have fallen so far that I can no longer bear the hollowness of my own resolutions. On Wednesday afternoon, I was seduced by a book lying on a table at Crawford Doyle: Brian Morton’s Starting Out in the Evening. A friend had mentioned seeing the recent film adaptation, which, I was bemused to note, had required nearly ten years of gestation since the novel’s publication. And even then, what fudging: the overweight and blobular Schiller, a seventy-one year-old survivor of the New York Intellectual galaxy, is played by the very dashing Frank Langella. Vincent Gardenia would have been more like it. Now that I want to see it, I’m stuck in the limbo between theatrical and DVD release.

Although the jacket blurb calls the novel “comic,” none of the many testimonials printed at the beginning of the paperback mention how funny the book is. That’s perhaps because I’m the only reader who thinks so. Once I’d calmed down enough to read a passage that had had me coughing with laughter, Kathleen pronounced “clever” and “sweet,” but not “funny.” I was reminded that nobody else finds Verdi’s ballet music side-splitting, either.

I’ll come back to the humor later. For now, the following grave and beautiful passage from very near the end. It concerns Casey, the middle-aged, half-black, half-Jewish professor — this is a very New York novel — whose relationship with Schiller’s daughter, ended years ago because she wanted children but he didn’t, has been rekindled.

The last few months had beden very different from what he’d expected. He was finally ready to begin a project that he’d been thinking about for years, and he’d been hoping for a few distraction-free months in which to concentrate. But now he was getting dragged into the middle of life’s confusions. Worrying about having children with Ariel; worrying about Ariel’s father — it wasn’tg a good time to be dealing with these problems. A part of him wished that he could refuse all this, just close the door on it all and do his work. But of course you can’t refuse it; you mustn’t even try. You have to let it in.

I’m not quite sure why this strikes me as a related thought, but when I was in Barnes & Noble yesterday, I saw a rack of inexpensive editions of classic novels. I had just picked up a copy of James Hamilton’s The Slaves of Solitude, which I fully intend, for what it’s worth (not much), not to open until I have finished Diary of a Bad Year, because George Snyder wrote that he was reading it and because there had been an interesting write-up in Bookforum, while Kathleen, whose idea this visit to B&N had been, looked at beading magazines. Looking at the rows of seriously great and deeply satisfying novels — Emma! Middlemarch! — I was overcome by the strangest sense of luxury. I had all of those books at home; what was more, I knew that I really liked reading them. I could just return to the apartment and curl up in a chair with one of them. Life could be that simple! If only…

He’s right: you mustn’t even try.

Suddenly, things are simpler. We’re down to four serious presidential candidates, two for each party. Once upon a time, their intramural competition for the two election spots would have taken place pretty much out of sight. Modern television news hadn’t discovered itself, hadn’t learned how different it was from print journalism. The process of self-discovery is still ongoing. Consider Fox News’s bundling of the Super Bowl on Super Sunday with the nationwide primaries on Super Tuesday. Super!

My aunt, like everyone I know, is very excited about Barack Obama. I would be, too, if it weren’t for Hillary Clinton. And if we weren’t seven or eight months away from the Democratic Party’s convention. Seven or eight months of fratricidal structure, conducted in full view of friend and foe alike! The prospect is so curdling that I take positive comfort in the “suspension” of John Edwards’s campaign. Perhaps, when the “black” candidate and the “woman” candidate have knocked each other out with their croquet mallets, Mr Edwards will return, to pose a serious threat to the Republican Party contender. Now that he is out of the race, however, the one thing that I am prolbablyh not going to do is follow my aunt’s advice and watch tonight’s debates.

Clearly I have become a deep-dyed cynic in my old age, like the Adolphe Menjou character in Frank Capra’s State of the Union — a film that I urge everyone to see every time a presidential election comes round. I really don’t care who’s in the White House so long aa it (a) is a Democrat but (b) is not Jimmy Carter. You would think that we don’t have to worry about the second part anymore, but Democrats have an alarming ability to bloom into Jimmy Carter hybrids. Mrs Clinton is just as tedious to listen to as the Georgia president, while Mr Obama has all of those outsider’s disadvantages.

If I were a normal person, I would find a candidate that I liked — at this point, with John Edwards out of the race, it would probably be Hillary Clinton (my mistrust of Barack Obama is as visceral as everyone else’s dislike of Hillary) — and content myself with hoping that she’d win in November. But I left that kindergarten behind a long time ago. I don’t allow myself to think how grand my favorite candidate would be in the White House any more than I waste my time plannint how I’d spend lottery winnings (it helps in the latter instance that I never buy tickets). I save that for the happy January day a little less than a year from now when, if things go well, a Democrat walks through the White House door.

Happily, I’ve got the victory party covered. My daugher has fixed the date for her wedding, a few days after the election. She may think that she’s just getting married, but if the right candidate wins, her nuptials will certainly be sailing a great wave of euphoria. And if not, I’ll still be happy as can be.

It’s a bit like Christmas. A pile of new toys. Trying to figure out how they work without breaking them. Wanting to play with all of them at the same time, even though that’s impossible. For a few hours, feeling quite carried away, amazed that the cornucopia has dumped so many treats in one’s lap. Very slowly, getting used to them — and finding out the little things that are wrong with them (always so heartbreaking).

I have two new toys.  The first is my second RoomGroove. the RoomGroove is a speaker system from Klipsch — the superior competitors of Bose — for the iPod.  For as long as there have been iPods, I have been telling friends that I have outgrown personal stereo systems — the sort of thing that you walk around with, looking vaguely spaced out.  The second person on my block to own a Walkman, I used to be quite excessive about having my own music on my person at all times, but I really did outgrow that.  There came a time when I no longer wish to escape the world around me, and the insulation of a private wall of sound went from chic to annoying. And perhaps my hearing wasn’t so good, and I needed it — all of it — for ambient input.

A couple of occasions since I got my Nano, I’ve wondered outside and enjoyed what was playing, but for the most part I listen to this device at home where it serves as an unexpectedly agreeable update on the table radio of yore.  The curious thing is that how completely different a table radio is from stereo system — I’ve known that since I was in my teens — but rather how nice it is to have a table radio again, after forty years. The difference is that this table radio plays only music that I really love, because, of course, I put it there. And now, it plays it in the two rooms where I spend most of my time.

I am using my other new toy to write this.  It is called Dragon Naturally Speaking, and it seems to work pretty well, although I’m still slow at it. The Dragon, as I can’t help thinking of it, gets all the big words right, but it mixes up the everyday pronouns and prepositions, which all seem to sound alike.  Such small words are hard to proof.  Of course, I could type all of this much faster than I’ve dictated it, but I’m curious to see the different things that will come out of my mouth, things that would never come out of my fingers.  My fingers are critical snobs incapable of saying, for example, “I read Blackwater Lightship this weekend and I really loved it!” At some point during the third week of prep school, I learned that it would be better to chop off my fingers than type such an insipid sentence.  But I can still say it — as you can see.

The point of the dictation software is to capture for transcription the off-the-cuff remarks with which I intend to replace my not very competent readings of pages from Portico.  (You see?  I really do speak and write pretty much the same.) these new podcasts will require two computers for production, the desktop for recording my voice in the lap top for transcribing it.  It is probably not beyond the capacity of either computer to do both jobs at the same time, but it is certainly beyond me to imagine how on earth did tell it how to do it.  So: two computers.  Two mikes, too.

Good heavens, I could go on and on.  I already have!

Upstairs at Caffè Grazie, a very agreeable destination for after-concert repasts, right around the corner from the Metropolitan Museum.

As the picture suggests, my life has hardly been an unmitigated misery for the past couple of days. But I haven’t had much time for sitting down, or any at all for thinking. I’ve been on the go since first thing Thursday morning. On Friday, I had to be at Ruptured & Crippled at noon, to see the rheumatologist; a Remicade infusion followed at one. The good news on the infusion front was that I’d gone a full three months since the last one. I hadn’t meant to push the interval so far past ten weeks, but twelve is how it worked out, and as I was none the worse for the delay, Dr Magid and I could congratulate ourselves (and the makers of Remicade) upon having gone from six to five to four infusions per year within the space of twelve months. The only thing better than a wonder drug is being able to get by on less of it.

On Friday night, I went to the museum for the first of this season’s Met Artists concerts. A very bad boy, I left at the interval. The music was wonderful, as always, but I was tempted away by the prospect of dinner with Kathleen, which I’d have missed if I’d stayed. She was still at the office at nine, and about to leave. Instead of going home, she met me at Caffè Grazie, where we had a lovely dinner, although the “personal” pizza that she ordered was as big as a regular from Ottomanelli’s.

After the usual tidying-up on Saturday afternoon (during which I listened to Don Carlo and thought how much I’d have enjoyed being a censor during the anciem régime), I attacked the kitchen. The kitchen didn’t really need attacking, but that just made the task more effective. Instead of being demoralized by carrying loads of decayed leftovers to the garbage chute, I had plenty of energy for taking inventory — and then for running across the street to stock up on shortfalls.

Satisfying as all of that domestic accomplishment was, I was stalling and I knew it. Sitting in a large box in the blue room was the second RoomGroove, purchased expressly to act as a receiver for transmissions from the first unit, in the bedroom.*  Would I figure out how to make this work? At first, it didn’t. But then it did!

Tomorrow afternoon, I’m meeting with Steve Laico, technical adviser to The Daily Blague. Among other things, we’re going to look at voice recognition software. Having recorded a thick wad of PodCasts through the fall and early winter, I’ve decided that reading scripts is not for me, and I’d like to experiment with ex tempore speaking from bullet points. Text obsessive that I am, however, I’ll have to have transcripts!  I also hope to learn a few thing about a more sophisticated handling of images.

It’s all phew.

* In other words, music playing on the Nano in the bedroom should be able to be heard in the blue room, even with the bedroom unit muted. If the new RoomGroove didn’t pick up a signal from the old one (or vice versa), I’d have simply made an expensive and unnecessary upgrade from the Logitech portable that I bought for the Thanksgiving trip to St Croix.

The list of things that went wrong yesterday would go on and on, if I could bring myself to compile it. At one point, both iPod speaker systems (different makes, different rooms) took to stopping spontaneously. At another, the freight elevator went inexplicably on the blink. The elevators go on the blink all the time, but this time no one knew why. Then it fixed itself, just like the iPod speakers.

Then there was my long phone call with Miss G, who — it’s official now — is planning to get married in November. Yesterday, we learned that she and her fiancé have found a ring. This was good news, because it meant that Kathleen wouldn’t be checking out estate jewelry on the Internet anymore — not, at least, on my daughter’s behalf. Every once in a while, I’d be summoned to the computer, to give my opinion about a ring or two. Now that the ring issue has been dealt with, Kathleen has moved on, to mother-of-the-bride dresses.

This afternoon, Miss G — who is going to change her name, dropping the “G” part — and I were talking about family members who might or might not be invited. She rather reasonably wants to stick to people whom she knows, or has at least met more than once. It wasn’t hard to imagine how unreasonable I should have been about this ten years ago. Even though I have learned, the hard way, how unacceptable unreasonable behavior is, I was pretty dopy on the phone, assuring Megan that she was absolutely right but immediately contradicting myself with vague remarks about how “funny” people can be about weddings. It was like talking on flypaper. I finally had the sense to put Kathleen on the phone. Kathleen also assured Megan that she was absolutely right, but she sounded completely convinced of what she was saying.

I long to watch Father of the Bride — the first one, of course, with Spencer Tracy — but I know that that way only madness lies. No movie that’s as old as I am is going to help me figure out how to  cope with the concept of a cheerful and comfortable wedding that also makes sense at every turn, and every symbol chimes.

Construction of the building to be known as The Lucida, 86th & Lex. Where have I seen that orange before?

After a hard day of reading for pleasure, I slept in this morning. When I crawled back into bed for what turned out to be the last time, at about a quarter to nine, I concentrated on the one or two tiny suggestions that I would have made to James Collins if I had had a chance to read the MS of Beginner’s Greek. I was so impressed by the power of my improvements that I woke myself up completely. Beginner’s Greek remains one of the warmest and most generous social comedies that I have ever read. I only wish that the author were more willing to put his hero, Peter Russell, through a passage as dark as the ones that make reading Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope so hair-raising. Beginner’s Greek is loaded with sympathetic characters. It just needs a tad more villainy.

Then I read the Times. The Monday morning Times, so different — so much thinner! — from the two weekend bundles. I’ll deal with those later today. Also, I’ve got to make good on my bogus rule about Christmas cards and Martin Luther King Day. I have to take a stab at it, anyway. Right now, I’m off to the barber, for a trim; and then to Agata & Valentina, for sandwich fixings. How much will you pay me not to post my shopping list?

A few weeks ago, Kathleen flew down to West Palm for a conference. On the flight, she overheard a lady in the row behind her tell another passenger about her visit to New York. She had come up from Palm Beach, where she lived, to hear her son give a book reading. His new novel, which she said was “light” and “fun,” was called, as best Kathleen could make out, Beginner’s Grief, or maybe Beginner’s Brief.

When the plane landed, Kathleen had a chance to take a look at the lady, whose voice had sounded not unfamiliar. Indeed, it was Mrs Collins, the mother of one of Kathleen’s schoolmates from the Convent of the Sacred Heart, Carol Collins. Ordinarily, I would not be telling you any of these details, but as you can already guess — because you’ve seen the generous ads in Condé Nast publications and perhaps even read the brief review in The New Yorker, the novel that Mrs Collins had flown to New York to hear read by her son was James Collins’s Beginniner’s Greek.

I’m not sure that I’d have ordered a copy of Beginner’s Greek if it hadn’t been for this extenuated connection — I have no business indulging in “light” and “fun” books at the moment, especially with the holidays just over — but I must say that I’m enjoying it very much, and not as a guilty pleasure, either. The writing is very good: I want to interrupt Kathleen by reading almost every paragraph aloud.

Why was Peter marrying Charlotte? Why was Charlotte marrying Peter? Charlotte worked in the New York office of L’Alliance Générale et Spécifique des Pays Francophones. The AGSPF fostered economic and cultural exchange among the French-speaking peoples of the world and tried to promote the French language and Francophone civilization in all places sadly suffering from their lack. Dogged and intelligent, Charlotte had mastered the politics of Chad (Djamous, the finance minister, was on the rise, though not supported by the Quay d’Orsay) and the diplomacy of Laos. She was, it seemed, always writing a report on intra-Francophone trade. There were lot of tables. In addition to this intellectual work, Charlotte also participated in the AGSPF’s busy social life: no minor Algerian poet could pass through New York without a reception. That’s what was happening tonight. Charlotte had to attend a dinner for a Belgian economist, who had appeared in town unexpectedly.

For a time, Charlotte’s father had worked in the Paris office of a New York law firm and the family had moved there when Charlotte was seven. With this credential, she could legitimately make France her thing, which she proceeded to do. After her parents divorced, when she was sixteen, Charlotte’s father and her stepmother bought a small property in the countryside, where they went every summer and where Charlotte would visit. Charlotte majored in French and she spent two years in Paris after college.

There she had had the requisite love affair with a Frenchman, with lots of tears. Maximilien-François-Marie-Isidore had been thirty-seven, an incredibly ancient and sophisticated age for Charlotte, then twenty-two. He was always lurking in the background, supposedly poised to swoop in and carry Charlotte back to Paris forever. That never seemed to happen, but on a regular basis, heavy-smoking, black-whiskered French friends — Héli, Valéry, Claude, Hilaire-Germain, Alexandre-César-Léopold, Gilles — would pass through New York. They would take Charlotte and Peter to obscure rock clubs and talk endlessly about American bands and films and writers whom Peter had never heard of. Of course, they all spoke English perfectly, and from time to time one or the other would engage Peter in conversation, while making it evident that he was merely doing so out of politeness.

Without wishing to be in any way reductive, I’ll nevertheless venture that Beginner’s Greek is the acerbically romping Knickerbocker comedy that Louis Auchincloss has declined to give us.

As Kathleen and Mrs Collins were parting, after their effusive greetings at the airport, the author’s mother — who hadn’t seen Kathleen in decades — asked Kathleen to be sure to “give my best to Kathy!” Oh, well.

Books that I am probably never going to read again (alas!) make up a great deal of what’s filling up the shelves at Westphalia, our expensive storage unit (see below). Reading Susan Dominus’s column in today’s Times set me to wondering if there’s some way that I can hook up with Tommy Books and Leprechaun.

Perhaps it’s the thought of lugging all those books somewhere that’s making me so lazy that I’m actually considering 27 Dresses as my Friday movie. Why? It’s showing across the street. If you’ll all think positive for a minute, maybe I’ll find the oomph to get myself to Kip’s Bay for Cassandra’s Dream. (But didn’t I just see that? And didn’t it star Philip Seymour Hoffman?)