An ephemeral view of Philip Johnson’s “Lipstick” Building, not ordinarily visible on its flat side except from right across Third Avenue. The building site that has been cleared so as to make the view possible was once home to the Metropolitan Café, an agreeable if undistinguished eatery. (New readers may be asking themselves, “Why ‘Westphalia’?” It’s because that’s where we keep detritus.)

Yesterday, I had lunch in midtown, at the Bateau Ivre in the Pod Hotel, on East 51st Street. I chose it because partly the friend with whom I was lunching lives nearby, and partly because I’m crazy about the croque monsieur there. After I’d made the date, I saw that it would make sense to walk up First Avenue afterward, to our storage unit on 62nd Street. I could bring a bag and stuff it with odds and ends. The sooner we clear out of that expensive facility, the better.

If I lived almost anywhere but Manhattan, I would drive up to the storage unit, load up the car a few times, and proceed straight to the town dump. End of story. But I do not live anywhere but Manhattan. Emptying the unit one bag at a time is pretty much the only simple way of getting the job done.

So I dutifully went. I filled Bean’s largest canvas tote with cups, saucers, plates and a teapot in an everyday Laura Ashley pattern that we used in the country house. There is really no room in the apartment for more china, but I like seeing Alice at breakfast. “Alice” is the pattern. I also brought home a clutch of books, including two volumes of Robertson Davies’s Deptford Trilogy, one volume of the Reginald Perrin Trilogy, and a first edition of Edith Wharton’s late novel, The Children. (No dustjacket, alas.) As I recall, Hermione Lee, in her recent biography of Wharton, thinks well of The Children, which I read a long time ago. Not that it wouldn’t be almost unconscionable, given everything else in this house that I’ve got to get through, to read it again.

I brought home some videotapes, too, bummers all: Sunday Bloody Sunday; American Gigoloi; Rush; Body Heat; and The Mosquito Coast. I don’t have any room for videotapes, either. Oh, and how about this treat: Men, Movies & Carol. Not the excerpts from The Carol Burnett Show that one might hope for, this is a collection of parodies made with Scott Bakula, Barry Bostwick, Michael Jeter and, in one case, Tony Bennett. Anybody who wants to come over and claim it can have it. Better hurry! It’s outta here! (But only after I watch it first, just to make sure that it’s terrible.)

Have you seen The Mosquito Coast? The blurb on the slipcase calls Harrison Ford “the immensely popular hero of the Star Wars and Indiana Jones sagas.” How quaint that anyone would think that that needed to be spelled out. River Phoenix, still a pretty-faced little boy in 1986 (and, a fortiori, still alive), is not mentioned; nor are Helen Mirren or Martha Plimpton. With a screenplay by Paul Schrader, based on a novel by Paul Theroux, this Peter Weir epic is not your regular laff riot. No.

Okay, I brought home Polyester, too. Somewhere in the house I have the original scratch-and-sniff card that was distributed during the first theatrical release. Farts, old sneakers — the usual John Waters bouquet. The movie is best enjoyed without it. If you ask me, Edith Massey steals the show from Divine. In one memorable scene, she attempts to hoist a wispy cocktail dress over her blocklike torso. The frock does not survive. “Damn designers!” Edith mutters. Then, in a touching moment, she strokes her friend’s hand and coos, “Purr, purr Francine.” Is that when the two women go off their diets and consume a chocolate cake? I don’t remember. It has been a while. Of course it has been a while! Everything still in the storage unit has been untouched in nearly ten years!

Purr, purr R J!

(New readers may be asking themselves, “Why ‘Westphalia’?” It’s because that’s where we keep detritus.)

It’s official: 2008, according to the calendar that I got in Grand Street last night, is the Year of the Wedding.

We’re talking November. Sorry: they’re talking November.

Be happy.

It appears that the big storm that we were told to brace for has passed us by. We can expect flurries tomorrow, according to the Times. I don’t know whether to sigh with relief or pout with disappointment. Part of me will always love the disruption caused by a major snowfall. No school today!

(I will kill, however, anyone who thinks that power outages are “fun.” Don’t try me!)

Did I mention the wi-fi voodoo witch doctor the other day? I’m too lazy to check. We were experiencing the oddest service interruptions in the bedroom, where the laptop lives. Was it the plaster that makes the cheek-by-jowl proximity of New York life bearable? I thought so. Or perhaps it was the Klipsch RoomGroove (the speaker system for the Nano). I asked my doctor. Tonight, however — before the doctor could get back to me — we found out. It’s the halogen lamps, especially the one that’s on a dimmer. “Turn it off!” I cry. “But how can I read without a good light?” Kathleen wants to know. My reply was objectionable. But as soon as they’re available again, I’m going to buy her a Kindle.

Getting back into the groove continues to be an easier-said-than-done sort of thing. Yesterday, I didn’t open my eyes until a little past eight, and getting out of bed for anything more than a run to the bathroom was out of the question. Eventually, I read the paper, but in bed — most irregular. The cold that had been skirmishing at the perimeter seemed to have breached my defenses. I hasten to add that it was hugely depressing just to look out the window. The roan-soaked twilight gave no indication of the hour, and the light seemed to dim as clock ticked toward noon. I was asleep again soon enough.

But by then I’d plucked a book from the pile — Frank Schaeffer’s Crazy for God — and turned on the Nano. With the Nano and the Klipsch RoomGroove, I have rediscovered the pleasures of the good table radio. When I was young, I came into possession of the family’s Grundig Majestic, a radio about the size of a toaster, complete with pushbuttons. That was my music source until, about thirteen or fourteen, I began to build my record collection. By the time I went to boarding school, I had a KLH portable — closed up, it looked like a then very smart Samsonite suitcase — and I’d have denied knowing the Grundig more vigorously than Peter denied Christ. I had embarked on the sea of Hi-Fi, on which even the smallest speakers were expected to make a great big sound. The Klipsch RoomGroove can make a racket, but it is not meant to be played very loud. High volume seems to advertise the shortcomings of MP3 compression. At a sound level that my grandparents would have been happy with, however, the unit sounds very nice. Yes, it is background music; I am not really listening. It would be almost impossible to listen closely, because I know the music as well as I know the feel of the chair that I’m reading in.

Crazy For God has been in a pile for a few weeks, ever since a friend read Jane Smiley’s remarks about it somewhere (The Nation, 15 October) or, more likely, heard about them on NPR. Or perhaps he heard Frank Schaeffer himself. I was told that the book offered an insider’s view of the Himalayas of cash that Christian-Right philanthropists contribute to the cause, and when I put the book down about half an hour ago I was just getting to that. Crazy For God portrays a world that I was unaware of until well into the second Reagan Administration, and it is very strange to read about extremely famous figures of whom I’ve however never heard before. Someone has been on another planet — and I’m pretty sure that I know who put me there. That’s for another time, though. For now, the code in my nose prevents me from saying more than that Mr Schaeffer is a very likeable writer.

To borrow is another day.

This spaniel, clearly too old (or disabled) to make any unnecessary moves, gazed at me with trademark mournfulness for quite a while before I responded by taking its picture. It had eyes for me only. Millennia of breeding made it impossible for me not to be warmed by such extravagant interest.

In November or December, I forget which, I watched Emmanuel Carrère’s La moustache. I had read the novel years and years ago. (Unsurprisingly, it took a while for the writer to make his own picture; the surprise was that he made it at all.) I wasn’t crazy about the book, and the movie, while quite a bit more engaging, was still too haunted by a paranoia that seemed forty or fifty years out of date. Accompanying the vivid camera work, however, was a striking score by Philip Glass: his Violin Concerto. The concerto, premiered in 1987, suited Mr Carrère’s story of a man who seems to have run through a bizarre temporal discontinuity (his father, much to his surprise, has been dead for two years, and his wife has no recollection of the moustache that he shaved off the night before). I wrote down the performance details as the final credits rolled by, and, sure enough, the soundtrack made use of the only recording, on Naxos. I ordered it from Amazon right away, but for some reason or other wasn’t in the mood to listen to it until last night.

The CD is a measure of how the classical music record scene has changed from what it was when I was a kid. When I was young, a performance by unknown artists on a budget label was extremely unlikely to be better than tolerable, and many were not even that good. Yet there is nothing less than first-rate about the Naxos offering, which features violinist Adele Anthony and the Ulster Orchestra under the direction of Takuo Yuasa. Ulster has an orchestra? Ulster has an orchestra that sounds this good? When I was young, the sound quality on an inexpensive recording would have been mediocre to awful — awful. The Naxos issue is clear as a bell and every bit as rich as it ought to be.

La moustache explores the fragility of the construct that we call the “self.” In my experience, this construct isn’t remotely fragile, but rather constituted of the grimmest granite. So inalterably stuck am I with the character that I wake up to every morning that the idea of a sudden singularity is more intriguing than frightening, as perhaps the reality would be, too. If I couldn’t dislocate my persona with a daily diet of LSD (senior year in college), then I’d like to know what kind of dynamite might have worked. One of the boons of growing older is that I no longer wish to escape an all-too familiar self; on the contrary, I’m prone to count my blessings, such as they are. But the notion that identity is tenuous doesn’t really sell in my vicinity. 

You’re right: this picture is out of focus. More out of focus than usual. Another thing that I have to see to pronto is the amassing of a collection of stock photographs that I can run when I’ve nothing more — timely.

So much to do. So many small things. I need to learn more about the iPod/Nano, for example. I turned it on the other day, and let it work its way through the music that I’ve uploaded. For some reason, it decided to clump the composers. It played all of the Mozart offerings before moving on to Poulenc’s Sinfonietta and then all of the Ravel — and so on. I’d put the thing on “shuffle,” but that doesn’t work with classical music. From the earliest days of digitized music, no one has ever bothered to teach player devices to treat symphonies and concertos as units. To the iPod and its CD predecessors, a symphony is just an album of four-odd songs, not “movements” meant to be played in a fixed order. Here is my prayer: let me shuffle the Mozart piano concertos, but don’t shuffle the movements.

I have the feeling that while I might just have made myself clear to other classical-music listeners, my don’t-shuffle-the-movements problem means nothing to most iPod users.

That’s just one thing. Then I have to call the appliance repair people who fixed the oven two years ago. At that time, the igniter was broken, and the gas wouldn’t necessarily light. Not good. Now the oven has a different problem: it’s not “cycling.” Gas ovens, you see, burn at only at the maximum. The temperature is regulated by a thermometer (a coil of metal, I believe) that shuts the gas off when the oven reaches the desired temperature, and then turns it back on when the oven cools. When this thermometer malfunctions, the oven simply broils everything. Not so bad, but, still, not good.

Then there’s the wi-fi reception in the bedroom. Too mysterious for words! Call the wi-fi doctor!

Several Christmas cards await responses. Not many — fewer than a dozen. I believe that the Christmas card season does not end until Martin Luther King Day.

Speaking of Christmas, there’s the Christmas stuff to put away. Surely one of the wonders of Christmas is that putting the Christmas stuff away is every bit as satisfying as taking it all out.

There are a few thank-you notes to write. Vainglorious ambition is my undoing when it comes to thank-you notes. I always want to write something immortally complimentary. Now that I am elderly, however, and actually receive than-you notes, I asm reminded that the delight of such missives lies in the receipt. If I weren’t afraid of being fearfully indiscreet, I’d thank LXIV right here for the smashing cocktail party that he threw for my birthday (and for the second year in a row!) at his jewel of a flat overlooking — a well-known open space. The only detail that I feel entirely free to divulge concerns one of the hors d’oeuvres, wickedly well-seasoned shrimps wrapped in bits of bacon! My two favorite food groups in one bite! It was too magnificent.

So much for tasty tidbits. It’s back to real life and its laundry list of chores. No wonder I let the holidays stretch out until the second week of January!

The “holiday season” ends with my birthday (Twelfth Night), and, because that’s my birthday, it doesn’t end any sooner. Where most people return to reality on the second day of the new year, I give myself an extra clutch of days.

Having thrown myself into the spirit of the season, however, I am now so sick of the sound of my own voice that I can’t even write. Sadly or not, however, I expect to recover, perhaps as early as tomorrow.

In search of an image to represent my exhausted state, I turned, not unnaturally, toward the unmade bed from which I had temporarily arisen. “Take a picture of that!” But I have no eye for mess. I don’t know how to make it cohere — as cohere everything must — for a photograph. So I wound up making the bed, and now I don’t think I’ll be climbing back into it. Might as well get dressed!

I mean, that’s how hopeless I am! I can’t do “pooped”!

Portrait of the artist as a Labrador retriever.

How did this get to be sixty? I actually have fewer double chins.

It’s not my favorite picture of me in the Garden of Eden, but I ran mine a few years ago on the old blog (you can see it here)*, and this is Kathleen’s. For some totally crazy reason, the photograph was printed on frosted glass, and I was about to throw the thing out when Kathleen cried NO! In my favorite picture, you see, I’m in bed, so it’s okay that I’m smiling, but in this head shot — oh, it’s so hopelessly… hopelessly quelque chose.

Well, anyway, happy birthday to me. Sixty! It’s not possible. I accept the fact that I’m older than God &c. But sixty? What I mean to say is, I haven’t completed my merit badges! I didn’t pass the test yet! To be sixty, you have to be Really Grown Up, and I, alas — well, Kathleen said that fifty would have sounded more believable. She is not trying to compliment me, I assure you. This is not about my youthful skin! It’s about how totally inadequate I feel now that I have been called upon by Father Time to sit on the Board of Graybeards. My beard has been grey – white! – for years, but I’m still not up to the task. Doesn’t anybody remember being eight years old and wishing to be ten? Imagine being ten and finding out that it was all a fraud — that you were really eight! “Oh, the horror!”

The worst thing about my being sixty is the implications for the near and dear. They’re not happy about it at all. Neither the elder nor the younger. Especially the younger — who are suddenly not so “younger.” They’d all much rather have seen me dead before this embarrassment.

Which is what makes Fossil Darling such a dear old friend. He’s the only one who’ll admit it.

Update: I got some very nice presents, including a knockout: the English edition of the Mitford sisters’ leters, autobiographed by herself, the D of D. That was pretty terrific, and all by itself it would have made this a red letter birthday, a standout among, er, many. But then something happened after the birthday dinner that put the day in class by itself. Correction: there is one other day in my life to which tonight may be compared. It was the day that I learned that I’d be able to marry Kathleen in a Catholic Church, something that was very important to the two of us. It wasn’t until I had the news that I actually bended my knee and proposed marriage. I was accepted.

Tonight, it was my turn to say “yes,” and a happier man has never breathed.

* Goodness! I just read the entry that goes with the snapshot of me in bed. I’d forgot! It’s my coming out story., And, that being the case, I have to tell you that the value of N is “2.” As in “second-rate.”.

It is, at last, very cold — very. I have brought inside the bottles of wine that chilled for the party on the balcony; later today, I’ll bring in the beer, the soda (a few eight-ounce cans of Coke and Diet Coke — nobody drinks soda at our parties — and the bottled water, although where I shall put the bottled water is anything but clear. The beer and the wine will go back outside as soon as the air stops being frigid. It will take me a while to go through them, but go through them I shall, and long before the weather turns warm.

The party on Sunday was a success. I’ve become binary about this sort of thing: a party is either a success or it isn’t, and modifiers, such as “big success,” make no sense anymore. It comes down to this calculus: was the party worth the trouble? This, in turn, depends on a three-pronged question. The first part is relatively simple: did the guests seem to have a good time? (I can’t, of course, ask if they really did.) The answer to that would have to be “yes.” Almost everyone who showed up found someone to talk to with an animation suitable to “the holiday spirit.” The few exceptions appeared to enjoy themselves while they were here.

The second part is: did Kathleen have a good time? This is the question that I can ask directly, knowing that Kathleen’s answer will be honesty itself. For a long time, I was disinclined to give parties for the simple reason that Kathleen complained that she never got to talk to anyone at any length. In those days, our parties were rather more raucous, evening affairs. Now that my model is the vicarage tea, however, Kathleen (and the other guests as well) can do some serious catching up. That, in the end, is what the party is for. Only a few of our regular guests see one another outside of our living room, but they have been seeing one another in it for so many years — the living room itself has not been changed (however mildly redecorated) in nearly a quarter-century — that an agreeable amount of mutual interest has accrued. I am rather relieved to report that none of our friends has so far undergone the kind of transformation that makes the Princesse de Guermantes’s party, at the very end of Proust, so positively exciting and even bouleversant, but we have certainly reached the point where just showing up in one piece is interesting. Illness and disease have, so far, not begun to take their inevitable toll.

Kathleen enjoys herself because the guests don’t have to be made to feel at home. They already feel at home (or so they tell me) the minute they walk in the door and see once again all the familiar clutter. By the time they’ve deposited their coats on the bed, they’re ready to party — even if it’s in a decidedly vicarage-tea sort of way.*

Finally: did I have a good time? And I daresay you can tell from what I’ve already written that I most certainly did. So it was all worth the trouble — which wasn’t very great: by the next morning everything had been quite easily tidied up and put away.

Except, that is, for the drinkables out on the balcony. A few minutes ago, I was interrupted by a loud, sharp report, as one of the small cans of Diet Coke literally blew its top. Clean off! Now everything but the bottled water is in the kitchen, where further explosions, if any, will do the least damage. 

* Please bear in mind that “vicarage tea” is an ideal that no crowd of durable Manhattanites can ever attairn. The dim hush is quite beyond us.

It is always the same. We give a party. We go to bed. I wake up early, feeling fine, and start to clean up. When the final dishwasher load is running, Kathleen comes to, sort of, and announces that she feels as though she has been hit by a Mack Truck. I bring her a glass of water and a few Advil tablets for her raging headache, and she slips back into slumber. Later the same day she rises and stumbles into her clothes, and it is time for another nap. 

When Fossil Darling called to thank us for the wonderful party &c, he told us that it was very nice outside. Windy but sunny and not too cold. So Kathleen thought that she ought to take a walk. Would we walk to the river, or in Central Park? We walked down First Avenue to Agata & Valentina, because I had conceived a desire to celebrate New Year’s Eve with beef stroganoff. Silly me, I hadn’t thought of this before, and it was madness to think of walking into that den of maddened shoppers on one of the biggest days of the A&V year. For all I knew, there wouldn’t be any tenderloin on offer. But I thought I might check it out, and Kathleen (later told me that she) wanted to humor me as thanks for the wonderful party &c, preparing for which, she insisted, “I did nothing.” I said, pretty cavalierly, that I’d “check out” the butcher counter; if there was a throng, I wouldn’t wait.

Kathleen hates being in Agata & Valentina at the best of times. It is very reminiscent of the hole into which Alice fell through to Wonderland. The shopping area and the checkout lane compete for the same square footage. A crowded 6 train at rush hour is slightly less unpleasant, because you’re unlikely to be rammed by shopping carts as you wait for your charcuterie (or wait to be waited on). For someone my size, this is not too great a challenge, but Kathleen, notoriously not tall, finds the crush wildly oppressive. She said that she would wait outside while I “checked out” the butcher counter.

But it was too cold to wait outside. Happily, the entrance area, which used to house a small cafe, has been given over to organic vegetables, but a few of the little stools and bar tables remain. Leaving Kathleen there, I plunged into the thick and soon — very soon — found exactly what I wanted, went back to the end of the line, and duly paid for a piece of meat that was just the right size. I don’t think that it took ten minutes altogether. (The checkout line, while crazy-long, moves crazy-quick.) I walked out the exit door by the cash register and back to the store entrance nearer the corner of 79th Street. Inside the entry area, surrounded among the turnips by deranged foragers, I found Kathleen, perched on one of the stools — sound asleep.

“Shall we walk down to the river?” I suggested, once we were outside.

“I need a taxi,” was the answer.

But what about the caviar, you ask. Surely I had to wait behind the insanely picky customers for “appetizing” foods (as smoked fish and pickled salads are called in New York) in hopes of securing an ounce or two of caviar?

No, I didn’t. My sleepyhead had taken care of that on Saturday — and not at Agata & Valentina.

Madame in her workshop.

The holiday hiatus continues. For the second time in 2007, I did not go to the movies on Friday. (I was in hospital the first time.) I’ve absolutely nothing to report, except that I’m already looking forward to getting back to regular life. The pile of books to write up for Portico is suddenly twice as tall as it was the other day. How’d that happen?

At the same time, I’m looking forward to tomorrow’s party. In the past, I’d have been lost in the kitchen about now, making this and that for the buffet table, waiting for the dishwasher to run its interminable cycle or struggling to find extra room in the fridge. Not this year. This year, aside from some very minimal edibles — miniature sandwiches of a vernacular description (ham and Swiss; turkey) and a platter of cookies from Greenberg’s — and plentiful but unimaginative potables, what I’m offering my guests is each other’s conversation. Call me Tom, and get yourself some whitewash.

What I’ve discovered is that the creative part of giving a party — the part that I’ve excised this year — is not the time-consuming part. I’ve still had plenty of errands to run, and the apartment to straighten up, and a list of last-minute reminders.* If I thought I’d be saving myself any work by “not cooking,” I was right, but not in a very interesting way. I wasn’t really thinking of saving myself work, though. I was remembering how reluctant people have been at other parties to interrupt themselves in order to eat.

In the past, I’d have been frantic about not being free to slave over my own party because I’d got to attend somebody else’s. Not this year. I’m thinking of just about nothing at the moment beyond the pleasure of going out for an early evening. Very old and dear friends are celebrating their twentieth wedding anniversary, and they’ve requested the pleasure of our company. For me, at least, a pleasure it will be. 

I’ll be checking in again on New Year’s Eve.

* I just remembered, in fact, to throw some rather dusty vases into the dishwasher, so that if anyone shows up with a bunch of flowers I’ll be ready.

This is a picture of my wonderfully sweet friend George Snyder. He is the boy in blue. Whatever is vexing him, I know for a fact that he has forgotten what it was. I know because I lifted this image from his blog.

Having met George very recently, I can assure you that the passage of time has done nothing to render him unrecognizable. I would know him in an instant, and so would you. But why does he get to be so lucky? He has, it seems, always had those keen sloe eyes. I, in contrast, have had to make do with the improving effects, such as they are, of increased respectability — ie, ageing.

The edifying thing about the Mitford sisters’ correspondence — to which I’ve become addicted, not least because I never knew that the D of D was so extraorder about faux modesty (quelle pièce de travaille, celle-là!) — is that you never know when Nancy is going to pop an amazing bit of Voltaire in your face. “This ruin is inhabited by a young person” — where did he say that? It is simply how I feel all the time, now that I’m sixty!

Central Park: The Engineers Gate

In and out of Bloomingdale’s in twenty minutes — how was that possible? It was a lucky combination: I knew where I was going, and the departments that I wanted were still where they’ve been for ages. My heart did sink a bit when I found Luggage just opposite the escalator at the sixth floor. Luggage used to be downstairs, near the subway entrance. Something tells me that, had I been looking for it, I’d have looked in vain for fine china and crystal. On the sixth floor, anyway.

What I was looking for, however, was right where I expected it to be, at the other end of the floor. Kitchen gadgets and appliances. It was time for a new electric kettle. Time for a new coffee grinder. The ones that I had worked just fine, but their plastic sheathing was depressingly grungy. I know that you can clean plastic with ammonia — but then I looked inside the electric kettle. Even with New York’s wonderful soft water! And as for the coffee grinder!  Enough is enough. Time to recycle.

I didn’t mean to buy new steak knives at Bloomingdale’s. I’d had my eye on a set of staghorn knives from Scully & Scully. Appraising the offerings from Henkel, however, I did a rethink. The staghorn handles are, to put it mildly, gamy, and some diners might find them upsetting, especially as we march into a greener tomorrow. Also they are (necessarily) made with glue, and the glue (inevitably) wears out. That’s what happened to the staghorn knives that I’ve been limping along with for about ten years. The Henkel knives were pricier, but — deal breaker! — they could be sharpened on the Chef’s Choice thingy.

I also needed gloves. Kathleen said, “Wait until Christmas, when everything’s on sale.” But why would Bloomingdale’s — even Bloomingdale’s — put men’s dress gloves on sale in the middle of the holiday season, when they’re being lost right and left? Exactly. I bought two pairs anyway. Although I’m aware of the school of character appraisal that is based on shoes, I myself judge people by their gloves.

Happy Day After Christmas! Time to wash all those dishes. By hand — it’s the good stuff. There have been great improvements in the operation of dishwashers over the years, and I expect that even the finest china and the thinnest gold leaf are safe in them now, but I’m in no mood to experiment with pieces that can’t be replaced.

A spare hour! Time to read The Sportswriter. Kathleen is not napping — quite the reverse — but I shall talk with her when the hour is up, and we shall plot the evening.

It’s hard to believe that it’s just an ordinary Wednesday. There’s a very thick atmosphere of Sunday.
 

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

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

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

As for this week’s Book Review,

With this, I send my very best wishes for the holiday to all readers and their friends. May the season be serene — however momentarily — and may the peace of the time be with you.

Whatever it may be that we are supposed to celebrate at Christmastime, what we do celebrate is memory, the memory not only of Christmases past that we have known but of long-gone holidays that we have heard about from parents and grandparents, or even read about it novels by long-dead writers. Nostalgia — the recollection of things that ought to have happened, perhaps, but did not — is an understandable hazard, but I expect that disappointment is far more common. Either way, it is difficult to place just what is important about our memories. Sleigh-bells and snow and children laughing over heaps of ribbon and wrapping paper certainly help to put one in the mood to remember, but they are not the point of the holiday. By themselves, the special effects of Christmas quickly pall. What are we looking for in our memories?

At least half of the Christmas cards that you’ve received this year will tell you: it is peace. The plenteousness of the season — what children notice most about it, and what distinguishes it from all the other times of the year for them, birthdays and circus-trips included — is meant to suggest a rampart against all the uncertainties of life, an assurance that things will go well. It’s an assurance that those of us living in northern latitudes earnestly need, as we look out the window onto weather that, however pretty, would kill us if we weren’t amply protected against it. The warmth of Christmas — the blazing hearths, the sparkling lights — promises a very immediate peace, disguised as respite. Gatherings of family and friends assure us that there are other people who belong to us and to whom we belong. As adults, we know that this peace, while not an illusion exactly, cannot last. It is nevertheless more intoxicating than any holiday potation, and once we have tasted it we want to taste it again.

Christmas makes fetishists of us all. Our attics and closets harbor boxes stuffed with special totems, which, if arranged just so, will — we rather pathetically hope — cast the spell of Christmas peace (the “magic” of the season). Too often stroked, the totems lose their power, and we may well decide not to bother with futile rituals. For a healthy person, however, not to try for Christmas peace at this most gregarious of times, whenever everyone around us is going for it, can be terribly depressing. How nice it would be, to pull the covers over one’s head, if one could be sure of sleeping right through the holiday.

But Christmas, despite the hustle and the pressure and the effort of taking on an extra long to-do list, is actually a celebration of letting go, of setting aside the world that is too much with us during the rest of the year. The paradox of Christmas reminds me of that mind-twister about the busy man — the already busy man who is the one person most likely to be able to find time for an additional job. He knows that it is the doing, and not the getting done, that constitutes living. Christmas is the one time of the year when it is indeed the thought that counts.

That thought is “peace.”

In the middle of the holiday season, it is very still here at home. The atmosphere is austere but serene, with everything more or less quietly in its place. In a few days, I’ll buy a tree, and re-arrange the living room in order to put it up; that will inaugurate the grand interruption that Kathleen and I have been evading for some time. We haven’t “done” Christmas since I don’t know when — three, four years ago? The interesting thing is that, even though I am “doing” Christmas this year, it’s with a minimum of fuss. I’ve sent out about half of the Christmas cards. I’ve ordered the roast for Christmas dinner — and the bûche de Noël, too, now I think of it. But I don’t feel harried or rushed. Tired yesterday morning, I could take the day off and read. If I hadn’t been so sleepy, I’d have appreciate the luxury more. But I did appreciate it.

At four or so, I realized that I had to watch a video that was due back in the evening. Curious, how long it took to rent it. Last spring, Kathleen and I heard Jordi Savall and friends at the museum play music by, among others, Marin Marais. Not having any CDs at home, I ordered a few. I came across them just the other day, still unopened. They reminded me that I wanted to have another look at Tous les matins du monde, Alain Corneau’s 1991 film about Marais (more or less), starring both Depardieus, Jean-Pierre Marielle, and Anne Brochet. Which I finally got round to picking up on Sunday.

What a Protestant movie, I thought — in Seventeenth-Century French terms, that is, where “Protestant” signifies a resistance to extravagant courtly grandeur and a preference for black garments and underfurnished interiors. Somebody else’s idea, in short, of “serene but austere.”

Does this ever happen to you?

From time to time — although not nearly so often as when I was young — I am overwhelmed by the feeling that I can’t possibly be stuck in this time and place. In this body. I’m not talking about a thought, but a deep-seated conviction. It’s as if I were about to blink my eye and afterward discover myself in another world, myself another person. I feel quite faint when this happens.

There is nothing spiritual about any of this for me, but I can see that it might lead some people to ponder religious possibilities. The illusion that your consciousness is greater — much greater — than the body from which it looks out on the world is divinely grandiose. Curiously, this is the only time that I sense what Descartes is getting at with his famous dualism. Ordinarily, my notion of who I am is rooted in my neatly attired body, not in some imaginary homunculus running a control booth in my brain.

Lately, I have been savoring an enticing thought, one unaccompanied by vertiginous sensations. If, as seems indisputable, we never know all about one another — we don’t come even close — then what a great freedom that mutual ignorance confers! And yet it, too, is an illusion. The idea that I might somehow be different from the person I appear to be — the person who behaves in such and such a way — is closely related to the idea of the novel that I would write if only I had the time. Both ideas are imaginary. St Anselm to the contrary notwithstanding, just thinking imaginary ideas does not imply a reality beyond the imagination. My idea of who I really am turns out to be unknowable (to other people) because there’s no existence behind it! In the end, everyone else knows me perfectly well; it’s only I who am in the dark.

Thank goodness that’s not what it feels like!

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

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

¶ The Ten Best Books of 2007.

Where have all the cars gone? The city seemed unnaturally quiet all weekend. There were plenty of people on the sidewalks, but vehicular traffic, at least up here in Yorkville, was light — or at least we thought so. Kathleen asked at one point, “Was there a headline that we don’t know about?” Not that we’re complaining about reduced traffic!

I had to admit today that I have been running at full throttle for much longer than usual. It is glorious to feel purposeful all the time, but I am a bit pooped. I had a few recipes to write up for today’s kitchen column, but I hadn’t got them earlier and I couldn’t bring myself to fuss. In fact, I couldn’t bring myself to the computer until seven in the evening. As promised, I fixed breakfast in bed for Kathleen, so that she could sleep in. Also as promised — to myself — I made pancakes. For well over a year, I’ve been relying on Eli’s terrific frozen croissants, which really do bake up as nicely as almost anything that you’d find in a bakery. It was time to check my pancake mojo. That wasn’t all I tested today: I also baked a quiche, making pie crust for the first time in the second Bush administration.

People ask from time to time for my pancake recipe, but I tell them that the recipe is not the important part. Almost any cookbook will offer a few good recipes, and my advice is to go for anything that calls for buttermilk. What matters with pancakes, though, is the griddle. If your stove has one, great. If it doesn’t, then you’re going to have to invest in something rectangular and large enough to span two burners. (I’m crazy — this will come as no surprise — about my non-stick All-Clad.) You want a non-stick surface, and you want it to be hot before you pour the batter. Because pancake batter is mixed very quickly, I recommend firing up the griddle as soon as you’ve measured your quantities but before you combine anything. Trust me — a good griddle is all there is to pancakes.

Oh — and heat the syrup. Just zap it (briefly) in the microwave.

Add coffee, orange juice, melon, scrambled eggs* and sausage, and you’ve got a great breakfast. Amazing how quickly it will disappear!

* Making scrambled eggs on the griddle involves childhood-caliber play. You must work the eggs with a spatula to keep them from running off, and of course you have to keep adding raw egg quickly enough to keep the scrambled egg from drying out. The possibilities for disaster are fascinating.

Stack the finished pancakes to one side of the griddle and the sausages or bacon to the other. Beat the eggs in a spouted bowl so that you can pour them very slowly onto the griddle, just a bit at a time.

For fancy footwork, turn one burner down to low before pouring on the egg. This will give you some variation in temperature, once you find out how to feel your way.