I am aware that many of you have posted good wishes and I am very appreciative.

I am doing very well, am up and walking, and expect to be home in the next few days.

RJ

My condition has deteriorated and I now find myself in the hospital for back surgery.  No worries – I am under expert care and will return very soon.

If I don’t feel much better today than I did yesterday, that may be because I tackled too many jobs. I made a simple dinner for the two of us last night – spaghetti in Buitoni arrabiata sauce – and breakfast this morning. No big deal, ordinarily. But I’m coming to the tentative conclusion – nothing’s firm until the surgeon goes over my X-rays (the taking of which was a surprising ordeal) – that I ought to do as little as I can. At the same time, I’ve ordered from all the local eateries two times over. A diet of diner food is demoralizing.

As for reading, I’m maxing out. I may have to take a day off from the printed word, and just watch movies. Yesterday, I finished Thomas Mallon’s Fellow Travelers. I was sobbing. Today, I read half of Katheryn Davis’s The Thin Place, a good book but not one that speaks to me as powerfully as the Mallon or as the even more astonishing Sacred Games, by Vikram Chandra. That nine-hundred-page masterpiece kept me busy for over three breathtaken days. I’ve also started in on Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes, in which the CIA is held up as a misconceived and incompetent organization run/ruined by Ivy League cowboys. It is a long way from the quiet piety of The Good Shepherd.

Speaking of movies, I’ve watched a few. Under the Tuscan Sun, the other night with Kathleen – a great fave of mine, and she had seen it only once. The Dreamers, Bernardo Bertolucci’s steamy movie about Soixante-Huit. Then, yesterday, Top Hat. It struck me as the most elegant American picture ever made, and to underscore its remarkable achievement, I watched its immediate predecessor, The Gay Divorcée, this evening. Everything vulgar and heavy about the earlier, much longer movie gets cleaned up in Top Hat, which, among other things, tamps down to the minimum the Busby Berkeley excesses of “The Continental.” Silly Alice Brady (whom I usually adore) is replaced by the delightfully mordant Helen Broderick. And, let’s face it, the clothes are much, much crisper. Top Hat gets everything right.

It did occur to me, though, that a song in praise of puttin’ on white ties and tails couldn’t possibly be sung by someone who had to do it with any regularity. That’s not because tails are uncomfortable, but because white-tie events have a waxworks aspect that is anything but invigorating.

I’d feel a lot better if I could raise my head a centimeter or two, but that’s a matter of morale, not pain. The pain is greatly reduced, and would be lesser still if I would just stay out of the kitchen.

Kathleen goes to Washington tomorrow for a conference, and she won’t be able to accompany me to the surgeon. But I’ll arrange for his secretary and Kathleen’s priceless Mona to set up an appointment, so that he can explain to her what he has told to me. I’ve reached the age where you don’t see a new doctor alone. You’re too anxious (at best) to pay attention to all the details.

Have the best Monday possible!

Convalescence is also the mother of invention, I’ve concluded. It is, after all, a kind of necessity. 

Since I was forbidden by Kathleen to undertake the weekly cleaning of our dustiferous apartment, I settled down with the Book Review. The idea of reading it, however, with no prospect of sitting at the desk in the blue room to write up my weekly feature, was too bleak. I resolved to get out the new laptop, which I haven’t used very much and which is therefore unfamiliar, and to write a note or two about each review as I went along, in the form of an email, which I would then send to the desktop for formatting. And that’s how I spent the mid-afternoon. It worked! But that’s enough for today.

Thanks to all the readers who have wished me well in comments and emails. I slept very well last night; the Valium seems to be fulfilling its primary function, as a muscle-relaxant. My head is still pushed downward, so that “eye-level” means “floor-level,” but I’m managing. I see a spinal surgeon on Tuesday, to rule out fracture. Fracture seems unlikely, but the possibility has to be looked into. Meanwhile, I’m left with spasming, inflamed neck, shoulder, and upper-arm muscles. If I sit still, the pain is slight to none. When I read, I place the book on a pillow in my lap. Oh, the reading I’ve done.

Happy weekend to all!

The other day, I had a bad fall, with still-undetermined consequences. Doing just about anything besides reading is painful, especially thinking and typing, both operations that this blog takes for granted. I will try to provide daily updates, but, for the time being, regular features are suspended.

A few weeks ago, music critic Tim Page published an essay in The New Yorker, “Parallel Play,” in which he described the suffering that he endured as a childhood victim of Asperger’s Syndrome – suffering that might have been alleviated had he known that he was afflicted with it. (He was not diagnosed until a few years ago, at the age of fifty.) Much of his misery seemed very familiar to me.

We are informally referred to as “Aspies,” and if we are not very, very good at something we tend to do it very poorly. Little in life comes naturally – except for our random, inexplicable, and often uncontrollable gifts – and, even more than most children, we assemble our personalities unevenly, piece by piece, almost robotically, from models we admire.

Very familiar. I talked about this article with my therapist. He had read it, too. At the end of the hour, I asked him to tell me if it had made him think of me. He said that it had.

So, a mild case, perhaps. As Mr Page implies, you can “learn” your way out of Asperger’s. It never goes away, but you learn how other people are likely to expect you to behave. That may be why I have such great faith in learning; knowing how much good it can do has enabled me to take an interest in things that were not at first appealing – most notably, politics. But the disorder, to the extent that I suffer from it, generates a kind of hyperconsciousness that can be exhausting. (I know that I drink martinis in order to shut it down for the night.) The dread of being exposed as an emotional fake never vanishes altogether. My feelings may be genuine, but they’re tainted by the fact that I learned to have them. I daresay that that statement makes no sense to some people: how can you learn how to feel? I must be mistaken – or so they might argue, at least in my imagination. I hope that the matter won’t come up.

It’s probably typical of my touch of Asperger’s, though, that I find it so interesting that I’m (inappropriately) telling the world.

Don’t look at me. I’ve only just launched the new, improved version of my own fabled  blog, and at a time of life when a project such as that turns fifteen days into one glutinous mass. Suddenly, voilà, the month is over, and the prize or piece of candy that one is going to be stuck with drops out of the chute.

Not that I’m complaining about the result! But I owe beacoup de courrieux. (Especially to Ellen and Gawain.)

I spent yesterday reading. First, there was a weekend’s worth of Timeses. As the British used to say, Friday to Monday. A lot of print. The rest of the day went to India – I’ll tell you more on Wednesday – until the late evening, when I jumped into Darin Strauss’s Chang & Eng. What a treat!

Kathleen didn’t know about Chang and Eng. Her innocence never ceases to confound me.

As predicted on Tuesday, I made a chicken salad with the remains of that evening’s roast. We’re going to have it for dinner this evening.

I made it for last night’s dinner, but in the event, we went out. Shortly after I’d finished the salad, while I was reading quietly and resting up from the afternoon in Central Park, Miss G called, delighting and surprising me with the suggestion that, as she and Ryan were bound for Planet Yorkville on a shopping expedition, we might get together. I was only too happy to agree. We sipped wine for an hour at the apartment before heading over to the Panorama Café at nine, where we sat outside in the cool of the evening. If we were to see all the movies and read all the books that were recommended over the course of the evening, we’d be booked for a month.

And why was I in Central Park on a Saturday afternoon? For the same reason I was there the last time: to sit with the blogger bears and watch the skaters. Joe not only invited me but brought along an extra chair. Most of the guys stretched out on blankets, or sat Indian-style. Neither posture is available to me, unfortunately, so I’m either locked in the chair or slipping on the slope. I wouldn’t miss it for the world, but I’m sure that people who don’t know me and whom I don’t get to meet think I’m very stiff-necked. I am stiff-necked, but it’s literal, not figurative.

In a most amusing development, Joe has hooked Father T on Ruth Draper’s Doctors and Diets. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Why do I feel that I’m leaving something, when nothing is going anywhere? The only change, for me, will be no longer having to deal with MovableType, a blogging platform that I chose in 2004 precisely because it was said to be the most daunting. (And it was daunting. I discovered that I am a closet masochist.) Exchanging MovableType for WordPress is like taking off a very heavy backpack. Life is suddenly, startlingly easy. I have no regrets.

But it’s true that I am leaving school. I started the Daily Blague at a strange time, right after George Bush’s second victory. The Blogosphere had been hopping during the campaign and was still very lively, as the writers at political sites that I visited, such as Crooked Timber and Obsidian Wings, tried to make sense of the disaster. Eventually, I lost interest in political blogs. I lost interest in all single-issue blogs. And I really didn’t know what to do with my own. For far too long, I filled it with reams of material that belonged in a different setting. I was like the bore who shows up at a cocktail party and wants to talk about the death sentence.

At some point or other, the old Daily Blague developed a serious comment-spam problem, and my Web host actually considered shutting it down, along with at least one other MoveableType site. That’s when I decided to move, both to another host and to another platform. By now, I had a very clear idea of what The Daily Blague ought to look and feel like. Thanks to the heavy lifting of Searchlight Consulting, the look and feel has been realized. But as Steve Laico can tell you, I knew what I wanted.

What distinguishes a blog structurally from other Web site is, of course, its interactivity: the solicitation of comments. Most blogs don’t get nearly as many comments as their creators would like, and The Daily Blague is one of them. But every comment is a lively acknowledgment that someone has been reading what I’ve written. I don’t know why any writer doesn’t keep a blog for that reason alone. (Writers who aren’t celebrities, that is.) The comments that the Daily Blague has accumulated have given me a better idea of where I stand in the world than I had before blogging.

To all readers, but especially to those who were “in at the birth,” I say Thank You!

After dinner, Kathleen asks if I’d mind if she spent “fifteen minutes” at the computer, looking for something at eBay. I snort, but I accede. I know that I will finish the book about the Congress of Vienna before Kathleen tires of the search.

Kathleen is in search of a Tarnhelm. Tarnhelms are indispensable when you’re trying to impersonate mutual fund board members. But they are also elusive, and Kathleen is not entirely sure that they exist.

Eventually, Kathleen comes across Fafner.com. Fafner offers Tarnhelms in many sizes and degrees of quality. Some will make you look like the vitreous porcelain shape of your choice; others will make you look like anything you like. Money is an object. It all sounds great, but Fafner’s customer rating is in the toilet.

Kathleen decides to look for an expediter who can maybe make a deal with Fafner.com. She finds an operator called Mime who agrees to get her the kind of Tarnhelm that she has in mind. Mime knows that Fafner is only going to sell a really worthwhile Tarnhelm to someone who can beat him at Dragonsblood, a digital game that Mime himself can’t be bothered to learn. Also, Mime doesn’t have the right keypad. But this kid he knows, Siegfried, is the only guy who can program a VCR, so Mime commits.

The long and the short of it is that Kathleen has to go to Gutrune’s to pick up the Tarnhelm. She is not cool about this, since Gutrune’s is in Williamsburgh. “I hate the subway,” says Kathleen. I offer to do my rainbow bridge thing, but Kathleen is into low profile.

Kathleen finds Gutrune alone in the shop. “All the guys are out on their bikes,” she says, peeling black polish off her nails. Kathleen resists the impulse to be condescending.

“Yes, we have the Tarnhelm,” says, Gutrune. “But this Siegfried guy wanted to wear it on his ride, so that he could ook like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix.” Kathleen has no choice but to wait for the funeral march.

Eventually, Siegfried’s dead body is carried back into Gutrune’s shop. “Will you please just wrap it up?” says Kathleen, finally in possession of the Tarnhelm and irritated that, although she lives in the age of the Internet, she finds herself dragged outside of Manhattan.

At this point, there is a tidal surge, and Siegfried’s body is washed away. “Oh, no,” says Gutrune – the last resident of Willimasburgh left standing. “The flood broke my cash register.”

Kathleen is initially speechless. Then she realizes that she’s in the virtual Rhine. Listening to the Rhinemaidens isn’t exactly fortifying. Then she realizers that she’s in an entry on a blog, namely this. Brünnhilde eventually buys a twin set.

And that is how it is nowadays.

Oh, to be young: what I’d give to be him. ie me. This is me thirty years ago or nearly, in a photo that I have always called “The Frog Prince.” That’s because the other person in the room was (finally) Kathleen. I put on the tie in her honor, even though she was sound asleep.

I behaved badly last weekend, at the funeral of Florice, my father’s wife for five yeas. I walked out of the church and kept on walking. In plain truth, I needed a bathroom. HMC has never been good about such mortal requirements, however, so, mad as usual at her perfidious inadequacies, I walked off without a bye your leave to anyone standing on the terraced steps outside St Saviours’s. I feel dreadful about it now. My father expected better.

We had a grand time today at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, exchanging corrective glances during a walking lecture on the arts, fine and decorative alike, of Eighteenth-Century France. Our leader’s art was sound, but his grasp of history was more blather and invention that we found digestible. The most egregious sins: Watteau was not of the same generation as Boucher and Fragonard (Watteau died some time before Fragonard was born); Louis XV did not return the court to the Louvre; and Mme de Pompadour did not inspire the invention of upholstery. Also, the French Academy of art (l’Académie de France à Rome) was never situated in Paris. It still isn’t.

LXIV was particularly exercised by the notion, broadcast by the curator, that André-Charles Boulle caught the attention of the Sun King by hauling his commodes out onto the Rue St-Antoine on days when the king was riding out to Vincennes.

Fossil Darling, in contrast, claimed to be entranced by the experience. But don’t worry; justice triumphed. He was made to pay half of my martini bill at lunch at the Trustees’ Dining Room afterward. Where I made up a wonderful word – it just came to me – in connection with a failed financier: lootocrat. “It just came to me.”

Then we went to see the pots, pictured above.  Aren’t they amazing? These Qing beauties have not been on view for a while, yet they are without a doubt objects that the Museum should never, ever, put in storage. Whoever made them climbed the Mount Everest of garish bad taste – and then declined to jump.

It’s Sunday afternoon, and I’ve decided not to pretend to have posted something yesterday by backdating it. At the same time, I don’t want anyone to worry. The day – yesterday, that is – began with a funeral in Park Slope at which I represented my family. Kathleen was kind enough to come with me. Not only that; she arranged for a car to take us there. (We came home on the train – three trains, actually.) I spent the afternoon cleaning, as usual, and when I was through with that I was seized by the desire to cook, something that hasn’t happened very often lately. I went to the store with a list, but I didn’t read it carefully and came back without cream. I went out again. Later, I made Suprêmes de vollaile aux champignons.

As soon as I’ve worked out the vast discrepancy between Julia Child’s timing and mine – her six to eight minutes was my twenty – I’ll write about this basic but delicious dish, which chicken breasts are baked in a casserole with mushrooms and a bit of green onion. When the breasts are cooked – that’s what took so long – they’re set aside in a warm place while the casserole is used to make a broth, wine, and cream reduction. Miam.

Yesterday was cool but glorious. Today not so much. It’s a great day for reading. Kathleen and I strolled over to Madison Avenue, where I bought a “toastrack” at the stationery store. You know, one of those thingies with three (or more) sections for sorting mail.

Speaking of getting organized, I have a new habit, and it’s getting me through The Economist, which, as you may know, is a shockingly expensive weekly. There is no point to subscribing to The Economist and then not reading it. At the same time, it’s hardly amusing reading. My new habit, or policy, is this: when in transit, or waiting somewhere, The Economist is the only permitted reading material. (If I’m eating alone, I can read whatever I please.) Every Saturday, I remove the previous week’s issue from my shoulder bag and replace it with the new one. It works! I may not read the whole magazine, but I get it covered. Now all I need is the ability to remember what I read.

There is reason to believe that my page on Bermuda, written several years ago, is dated in at least one respect: the major Front Street shops, one hears, have closed. Bermudians have made a very hard decision, to restrict the incursion of cruise ships, and they have also rejected gambling. Tastes in travel have certainly changed; rest and relaxation no longer seems to be an important vacation objective. Bermuda will have visitors as long as it manages to stay above sea-level, but its principal industry is not tourism but reinsurance. I love the place, even now that I understand what a fantasy-land it is.

¶ Yorkville High Street>Travels>Bermuda.

Yesterday, I had a big day. I went to the movies in the morning and to a baseball game at night. It was a very lucky day for anyone to have. Most readers will probably be surprised about the baseball part. So am I.

¶ 2 Days in Paris.

¶ The Cyclones at Keyspan Park.

Today’s page isn’t really old enough for pointing, but I’m full of the spirit of it. I have met so many amazing people in the past few years, all through the Internet, that I wonder if we are not on the brink of an age in which you forget about the high school classmates that you’re stuck with and check in with the Trollope reading group first.

It took me a long time to grasp the central truth about parties, which is that the guest list is everything. When my parents gave parties, which was fairly often, their guest lists were virtually predetermined. In Bronxville, there were the country club friends and, less often, a circle of business people. In Houston, it was either business or St Michael’s Parish. What distinguished one party from another was the occasion. In other words, the parties were virtually indistinguishable.

I live a completely different life. I belong to no groups. I know a number of interesting people who might not be expected to get along with each other. Inviting everyone I know to one big party is not a good idea, but, as I say, it took a while to figure this out.

¶ Yorkville High Street>Curriculum Vitae>Rethinking Parties.

Like the fool that I am, I Googled myself.

Very nice that the sites show up. That was really all I wanted to know. But how peculiar that the third item on the list was our engagement announcement. Not the wedding announcement, but the engagement – Kathleen got in twice. Of course it doesn’t make sense now; the Times doesn’t even think of publishing engagement notices. We wouldn’t make it by today’s criteria.

What I “love” about the story is the absence of “previous.” The way the article is written, it sounds as though my marriage to Kathleen was annulled before I left the church. The Times used to write, “Mr X’s prior marriage ended in divorce,” or somesuch. “Annulled” is very Catholic. I am one one of the very few men with a child from the first marriage who got to marry in the Church a second time. The marriage to C may have been canceled, but Ms G wasn’t.

I don’t think that my gay friends truly appreciate my hardships! They never take me to lunch.

It’s past midnight, but I’ve just watched a film that turned out to be extraordinarily interesting. It’s not the best-made movie ever, even though it stars two pluperfect luminaries, Susan Sarandon and Sam Neill, and has even more firepower thanks to Emily Blunt, whom we finally get to see without the ridiculous eye shadow that was forced upon her face in The Devil Wears Prada. My lord, she’s lovely! And equal to sicko roles, too. I think she learned the local posh dialect for this movie. Born in London and raised in Roehampton (which is still London), Ms Blunt softens certain syllables in a way that made me wonder. Mind you, when Nicole and I run off together we are going to talk totally Yankee prep.

You laugh. Kathleen just discovered that William Hurt, a/k/ka Billy Hurt, was a camper at Timanous, the brother camp of Kathleen’s Wohelo. I always feel sorry for those guys, because they were stuck on Panther Pond, while the girls had Lake Sebago. On second thought, it was probably best that the boys had Panther Pond – a manageable lake – to themselves. Sebago is big. Lots of camps on Sebago, if you get my drift.

Truly fascinating. Billy Hurt, so to speak, is two years younger than I am and three years older than Kathleen. And what does Kathleen say? She tells me that I’m lucky she didn’t meet him back in the day. Her fervor for the star of Broadcast News is such that I once protested that when I came back again in another life, I’ll be William Hurt. Good! she pronounced.

I suppose that that means that she still wants me. Even if I look better.

There’s little or no incentive to post an entry today, because a sizable
contingent of readers isn’t going to check in. They’re the people who like to
know what Kathleen’s up to, and today they can do that without my help, because
she’s right there with them, in Raymond, Maine, where her old summer camp sits
on Lake Sebago, and where a couple of fellow counselors have weekend houses.
Kathleen flew up this morning, on an eight-o’clock plane. I made the mistake of
getting up with her. Twilight is far off, but I can hardly keep my eyes open.

How about all those crazy people, sitting out in the sun! Sheer madness.

In the distance is the Manhattan Psychiatric Center. It looks deserted when we drive by on the Triboro Bridge, but apparently it’s still in operation. Ha! It’s address is a very misleading “600 East 125th Street.” What kind of a joke is that? Although within the Borough of Manhattan, the center is not on Manhattan Island, but on Ward Island, across the Harlem River. You can tell that I was visiting in the middle of the day, because the  shadows projected by the wings are so thin. About now, the shadows will make the building look like the enormous sundial that, come to think of it, it is.

The weather is so beautiful that I supplemented a trip to the grocery store
with a walk to Carl Schurz Park. I looked across the East River at the Astoria
Houses, with, just beyond them, the much swankier Pot Cove Tower. I’m pretty
sure that that’s not what the luxury building, visible from our balcony, is
called, but Pot Cove is what it stands over. I took pictures, but my hand wasn’t
steady enough. When are they going to make cameras without push buttons?