The perfect book for August – or so it would seem. In fact, Tom Lutz demonstrates just how much work serious loafing requires.
This jolly book got a so-so review in the Book Review, and I duly took note in these pages. Mr Lutz got hold of me to tell me that, in his opinion, the review was completely wrong. How could I doubt him?
What am I reading? That depends on which pile you look at. My official pile, on the bedside table, hasn’t been touched in weeks, except to be dusted. I’ve got issues with every book in it. That’s why they’re still there, and that’s why I’ve gone on to other things, such as Christian Jungersen’s The Exception and Tessa Hadley’s The Master Bedroom – both great reads. At the moment, I’m not committed to anything (excepting, of course, the difficult books on my bedside table). So I’ve plucked a couple of books from other piles around the house. As long as it’s 15 August, I may as well read about India. Now is the time to get through Vikram Chandra’s very thick Sacred Games. It’s about a gangster in Mumbai, I believe. Or perhaps it’s about a policeman. The other book is what might be called High Gossip: history at its most social. The book in question is David Gilmour’s The Ruling Caste: Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj.
As for the this weeks Book Review:
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.
It feels like a thousand years since I’ve been to the theatre. Last August, Kathleen and I went to the theatre every Friday night, and what fun we had! We meant to do the same this year, but circumstances have worked against it. There’s only one play on Broadway that I’m keen to see, Old Acquaintance. A production of Pygmalion, with Clare Danes and the amazing Jefferson Mays is coming up – must order tickets.
Based on a Totally True Story is a bittersweet comedy about Hollywood’s ability to rip off the heads of creative people and then to sew them on backwards. It made a permanent Kristine Nielsen fan out of me.Â
What is it about the American psyche that hates maintenance? Is it the reminder that we’re still where we were? We haven’t moved on to some fresh paradise, haven’t built sparkling new cities in the middle of nowhere? Samuel L Schwartz, New York’s chief engineer for four years twenty years ago writes an understandably impatient Op-Ed piece today. “Catch Me, I’m Falling,” about how much money we would save if we took care of our bridges instead of waiting for them to crack. Not to mention lives.
Rather than lubricating the bearing plates that allow the Williamsburg Bridge to slide back and forth with changes in temperature and loads, we let the bearing plates jam, which cracked the concrete pedestal the span sat on. Twice a year we needed to stop traffic, jack the bridge up and slide the pedestal back in place. Instead of coating the bridge’s steel, we allowed it to become nearly paper-thin. This required the replacement of beams, which made the repairs eligible for federal funds, instead of merely a paint job with city money.
And what is a story about the whiff of corruption, coming from programs for studying abroad, doing on the front page?
Here’s a short page about a thriller that was subsequently turned into a film starring Daniel Craig. You’ll also have a look at what Portico looked like a few years ago, before the blogging. I see from my database that I have given the book away. I suspect that one of these days I’ll buy it in paper and read it again. What, exactly, is the pleasure that books like Archangel provide? Could it have something to do with all the hard work – the tedious preparation – that their unconsciously glamorous heroes put in, alongside the derring-do? Come to think of it, I haven’t yet read the copy of The Day of the Jackal that I picked up a while back, to take the place of the lost review copy that I got at the radio station.
¶ Archangel.
Catching up with several days’ worth of Timeses, I only just read the news about critic James Wood’s move to The New Yorker. Hooray! I’ve missed him, having given up The New Republic because of its bellicose stance on the Iraqi misadventure. But Motoko Rich’s little piece in the Times is priceless, because of a wonderfully self-regarding quote from literary lion Leon Wieseltier.
Leon Wieseltier, literary editor at The New Republic, said, “The New Republic plays many significant roles in American culture, and one of them is to find and to develop writers with whom The New Yorker can eventually staff itself.â€
Jean Ruaud mentions the local station de vélib in his latest entry. I didn’t really know what he talking about, but of course it’s the new free bicycle service that Paris mayor Bernard Delanoë inaugurated last month. I found these snaps at Flickr.
Now, what can I point you to today? The calendar calls for something culinary. What looks good? Ah – yummy. But can there be a dish more out of favor than this:
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.
One might well ask why I have shelved, as it were, my page about Joseph Duveen among the history books. Surely the man responsible for the greatest transfer of European art from the Old World to the New ought to be visited among artists and other creative types in the Audience branch of Portico. Perhaps. I might put a link up over there someday. But the page belongs where it is. Duveen’s achievement as a top-of-the-line art dealer, working at a time when the publicity of auctions was distasteful, was acutely historical, in that it couldn’t have happened much before or after his allotted term on Earth. Although a man of great culture, Duveen is best understood as a virus that found its window of opportunity. Conditions were propitious; Duveen attacked; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art itself, boasting the Bernard Altman collection that Duveen assembled, would be a far poorer place without the legacy of Duveen’s opportunism.
And then there’s the National Gallery in Washington. The founder and principal benefactor was the unhappy Andrew Mellon, but the guy who did all the legwork was Joseph Duveen. Both men died before the museum opened its doors, in 1941, but it remains a joint monument.
I hope that this page will inspire you to seek out a remaindered copy of Meryl Secrest’s flawed but impressive biography. Duveen is an ultimately unknowable man to know about.Â
I am not a philosopher. I do not believe in systems, metaphysical or otherwise, that explain how the world works. If I believe anything, it’s that we’re far too unintelligent as of yet to be claiming to know how the world works. We’re still working on building bridges that don’t fall into the Mississippi.
In common parlance, “philosophy” denotes a way of living, an understanding of virtue. My “philosophy” is built on a single concept: decency. I believe, crazy optimist that I am, that everyone who has survived adolescence knows what decency is. I’ve written two pages about it; if you’re interested, you’ll find a link to the older page in the newer.
I took the day off, to read Christian Jungersen’s The Exception. If you can imagine a thriller set in the office of a human-rights organization – but you can’t, not at least until you read this amazing novel. Marcel Theroux gave it a boost two weeks ago in the Book Review, and as you can see I couldn’t wait to read it. As for writing it up, that’ll be ticklish. Thrillers can difficult to cover.
Happily, there’s nothing so exciting in this week’s issue.
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.
One of the great, unforeseen advantages of my scribal shrine is that it’s a great place to hang Post-It Notes. I have a dispenser on the desk; the notes come out in fanfold. Very handy. But I never knew what to do with the notes once I’d written them.Usually, the notes constitute a horizontal to-do list. Do this, call that. Today, there is only one Post-It in view. On it, I have written the French word affût. I don’t know what this word means. Its denotation, “carriage, mount,” is clearly not the sense in which it’s ordinarily used. A l’affût seems to mean “in hiding.” The phrase être à l’affût de means “to be lying in wait for” or “to be on the lookout for.”
That’s all very well, but when the word pops up in French texts, none of the foregoing makes complete sense.
Have you got all day? Here’s a very long page about art and art criticism. What’s amazing to me is that I seem to know what I’m talking about. I read the page now with a gate-keeper’s eyes (to which I’m not entitled, either): what incredible impertinence!
There’s one sentence, though, that I really don’t understand.
We’re wired, sadly perhaps, to distinguish the things that happened before our parents’ generations from the things that happened earlier. We seek a richness of detail about what’s closest to us.
I think that the first sentence is missing a “not” – “We’re not wired.” But I’m not sure that the sentence means anything. Every once in a while, I fall into fatuity. If you can figure out what I’m trying to say, let me know.
Comes now an ill-written account of the work of economic historian Gregory Clark. Nicholas Wade’s “In Dusty Archives, a Theory of Affluence” is one of the gobbledy-gookiest things that I’ve read in the Times in a long time, but it’s typical of the paper’s ability to make hash of new ideas. The first paragraph recites the passage of some (mostly Western) cultures from “abject poverty” to “amazing affluence” via “the industrial revolution” – a revolution that has never been satisfactorily explained. (Why did it happen where and when it did?) Here is the second paragraph:
Historians and economists have long struggled to understand how this transition occurred and why it took place only in some countries. A scholar who has spent the last 20 years scanning medieval English archives has now emerged with startling answers for both questions.
Suffice it to say that Dr Clark theorizes that Malthusian pressures on the English population led to genetic changes favoring the nonviolence, self-discipline, and ability to save that characterize the middle classes. It’s an interesting idea, and quite possibly correct. But Mr Wade’s second paragraph is so deadly that few readers will get far enough to form an opinion. Who cares about scholars spending twenty years in the archives? Give us the sexy bit: human evolution, which most people seem to think of as having ceased, proceeds as we speak!Â
Five thousand years, ago, scientists say, everyone was lactose-intolerant. Â Adults could not digest milk. Then God created Denmark and Holland. It didn’t take long for Man to invent Ice Cream.
Maybe this is the problem with newspapers: where a magazine such as The New Yorker would write up Dr Clark’s ideas, the Times is more interested in the academic debate surrounding them. The debate is “news.” Everyone seems to agree that Dr Clark has made some rock-solid findings, but not everyone agrees with his interpretation. The Times projects the debate about that interpretation, which may be lively enough to insiders, ahead of the interpretation itself. General readers who are unfamiliar with Dr Clark’s theories, however, are unlikely to care about the debate.Â
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.
Reading The New York Times this morning was very strange. The paper is now a column narrower than it was yesterday (and forever before). The Times says that it’s a purely pragmatic move that will have no effect upon content, but that’s manifestly impossible. The paper certainly isn’t going to reduce its ad space. I’m not really complaining, though. The Times has lost so much of my respect in the past seven years that I consider dropping it at least once a week. “The paper of record” – hah!
There’s an interesting editorial about language: is it a uniquely human thing, or can animals talk, too? All right, what’s interesting is that the Times is editorializing about what seems to me to be a totally religious issue, where “religious” means “believing that human beings are not animals.”
In a new book called “The First Word,†Christine Kenneally catalogs the complex debate over language and includes one particularly revealing experiment in which scientists put two male apes who knew sign language together. One might have expected these guys to start grousing about their keepers, to wonder at beings that are all thumbs and actually seem to enjoy giving away bananas. But, no, they started madly signing at each other, a manual shouting match, and in the end, neither appeared to actually listen to the other.
So, are two creatures actually conversing if they’re both talking and nobody is listening? Where does talking-without-listening put one in the animal brain chain?
Let’s see, talking without listening. Many wives can think of someone who might qualify. Teenagers do, easily. And parents of teenagers. Also, a lot of successful politicians and talk show hosts.
Whoever wrote the editorial left out Woody Allen’s movies. Have you ever noticed how rarely his characters listen to one another?
The narrower broadsheets are really unsettling.
The other day, I finished reading Alexander Waugh’s Fathers and Sons, and came away thinking that the Waughs are almost as interesting a dynasty as the Mitfords – although with the Mitfords the magic was confined to a single brilliant generation of sisters. As it happens, Evelyn was a good friend of Diana’s right at the beginning of his career; he dedicated his masterpiece, Vile Bodies, to her – having read sheets of it to her during her confinement (in the West End, while she was pregnant; not at Holloway). Later, he got to be good friends with Diana’s older sister, Nancy. and their correspondence, which has been published, is great fun to read. So politically incorrect! Worse than Mad Men, even!
My Mitford page is getting to be too lengthy, and undoubtedly the current file will one day be reduced to a menu leading to many others.
¶ Reading Matter>Reading Matter>Shrieks (Pavillon Mitford).
As I was rounding up pages for August, I decided that there were two that deserved to be re-presented every year. On the last day of the month, I’ll point to what is essentially the “About Me” page at Portico, just to be sure that everyone sees how handsome I used to be. And on the fifth, I will point to Fossil Darling’s signature contribution to the enterprise: his recipe for a ghastly stew that he aptly calls “Depresseganza.” The idea is that the mix of chili, corn, rice, and crushed tortilla chips is just the thing when you’re feeling low – the ultimate comfort food. To me, it sounds about as comfortable as the upholstery that lines a coffin.