Here is a bit of schist or granite or whatnot – rockface – from Carl Schurz Park. The only interesting thing about the image is that I just learned how to resize it, using the latest version of PhotoShop Elements (an application that I have used for three generations), which I bought for my new-ish laptop. At first, I couldn’t figure out how to resize the pixels. The instructions at Help were totally counterintuitive; it was only when I did what they told me not to do that I was able to move forward. 

Typical. Resizing images is just about all I use PhotoShop for.

Not so typical is a bit of what feels like bait-and-switch from Coffee Cup. I  bought their HTML editor for the new-ish laptop for one reason only: Microsoft has discontinued FrontPage. I’ve used FrontPage for seven years, learning to live with and love its maddening limitations. Were it not for Microsoft’s greedy copy protection racket, I’d just go on using FrontPage for the rest of my life. Now, Coffee Cup isn’t as expensive as FrontPage, but perhaps there’s a reason for that. Whereas FrontPage reads my stylesheet without so much as a burp, just as every browser does, Coffee Cup requires an additional product to render stylesheets usable with their HTML editor. $34 additional, to be exact, and another $13 for hard copy. (Essential, because I’ve been unable to download software of any kind with our wi-fi connection.) I’ve written a blistering letter of outrage, but I haven’t sent it.

By and large, I’ve had it with innovation. Everything can just stay where it is for ten years. Then maybe I’ll have an appetite for a bit of change.

Three weeks ago, on the day after I came home from the hospital, I went to the barbershop for a trim. Working around the neck brace proved very difficult for the barber. In any case, short and scruffy as it was, the beard still needed trimming, so I went back today. It was my regular barber’s day off. One of his colleagues asked me if my beard had been shaved in the hospital, or, worse, by me. He was shocked by my answer. But he got me looking fairly normal.

What I’m reading avidly at the moment, and may even have finished by the time that you read this, is Bliss Broyard’s One Drop: My Father’s Hidden Life – A story of Race and Family Secrets. As was widely revealed after his death, former Times book critic Anatole Broyard was an Afro-American man, pure and simple, who managed to pass as white. The “family secrets” angle of the book’s subtitle is especially intriguing, because Ms Broyard and her older brother, Todd, soon discovered that, among people who knew Dad well, it was only his family, or at least his children, who didn’t know. I can stare at the jacket photograph every which way without being able to “make out” Broyard’s “black” features, but they were apparently obvious to other blacks.

Ms Broyard wrestles with a problem the tectonics of which have shifted out of recognition. Once upon a time, despite inheriting many of her mother’s Norwegian features, she would have been deemed black at least by Southern Americans. But as the child of educated (relative) affluence who grew up in one of the tonier precincts of Fairfield County, Ms Broyard’s “blackness” is ruthlessly limited to a genetic inheritance of which she was simply unaware until she was in her mid-twenties.

So far, One Drop has merely convinced me that the idea of race is even more meretricious than I thought it was.

As for this week’s Book Review:

¶ Dangerous Obsession.

Actually, this isn’t about Jersey drivers so much as it is about driving in Jersey.  

What is it with Jersey roads? Drive around the state for a few days, and you won’t wonder why insurance premiums are among the highest in the land. From Richard G Jones’s “2 Truck Drivers Die in Crash in New Jersey.”

The chief said the eastbound lanes had recently been resurfaced. “This is a typical accident out here,” he said.

Asked how often his department responded to serious accidents in the area, he replied, “Daily.”

People who live near the highway are also familiar with the sound of sirens and the sight of traffic tie-ups while accidents are being cleared. Some residents, though, said the crash on Monday was especially unnerving because of the amount of smoke and flames and the sound of the collision, which reverberated in homes half a mile away.

New Jersey needs its own ministry of ponts & chaussées.

What follows (at Portico) is a lightly edited (and corrected) letter to a correspondent and friend who recommended that I rent and watch The Lookout, a picture that I don’t even recall seeing advertized. Written and directed by Scott Frank, it stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Matthew Goode, Isla Fisher, and Jeff Daniels. Very roughly, it’s about the difficulties that Mr Gordon-Levitt’s character has in reconstructing his life after sustaining a head injury in an automobile crash for which he was irresponsibly responsible, Two of his friends were killed, another also severely wounded. The “problem” aspects of the plot, predictably, yield a certain “made for TV” quality that is not entirely overcome until the second half of the film.

We watched the movie on Saturday night. The first thing that I wanted to do on Sunday morning was to write a report to my friend, telling her no less about the circumstances in which I saw the video than about the kind of critical response that might show up in one of my “Friday Movies” pieces. I see the movies covered in “Friday movies” in theatres, and if nothing else my letter backs up my insistence that I can respond to a film far more intensely on the small screen at home than on the big screen in public. I don’t seem to meld with audiences in the dark; the everyday detachment that gets me from my flat to the movie house follows me into the auditorium. At home, I am far more defenselessly at the mercy of what I’m watching.

The following rough synopsis ought to make my letter at least fairly comprehensible: a creep called Gary Spargo (Mr Goode) uses his girlfriend, Luvlee (Ms Fisher), as an enticement to engage Chris (Mr Gordon-Levitt) as a lookout in a robbery that Gary has planned for a bank where Chris works as a night janitor (despite his upper-middle class background), and where Mr Tuttle is the manager who won’t give Chris a chance to step up to teller. That Gary’s plans will miscarry is never in the slightest doubt, especially once we get to know a cop (Sergio di Zio) who likes to stop by the bank every night to share a box of doughnuts with Chris. Viewers familiar with Woody Allen’s Match Point may have no trouble recognizing Mr Goode’s face, but nothing else about him will be remotely familiar. Bone, Gary’s shooter, is played by a nasty-looking Greg Dunham. Jeff Daniels plays Lewis, a blind man with whom the local social workers have hooked Chris up with as a flatmate.

¶ About The Lookout.

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From an article about Russia’s slide “toward a more authoritarian system” in today’s Times.

Tanya Lokshina, the chairwoman of a Russian human rights organization, the Demos Center for Information and Research, was among those who met with Ms. Rice on Saturday. She said that given the focus on security matters, the meeting with rights campaigners had been mostly symbolic.

She contended that the United States had “lost the high moral ground,” and thus should join with European countries to make it clear to Mr. Putin that a drift further away from democracy was unacceptable diplomatically.

“The American voice alone doesn’t work anymore,” she said after the meeting. “The Russians are not influenced by it.” She said Ms. Rice had bristled at the criticism, replying sharply, “We never lost the high moral ground.”

Whatever you say, Condi.

Regular readers know that I have no use for unfavorable reviews. What happens, though, when you read a book that, for one reason or another – or for a dozen – doesn’t appeal to you, even though you can not only understand but respect its popularity? My move is to give myself the bad review, to highlight the shortcomings in my imaginative world, or the thousand prejudices that remain in the field even when I’m sure that I’ve just mowed them all down. Then I look for the good things in the book – the things that I wish that the author had made more of, but without complaining that he or she didn’t. As it happens, I suspect that I’d have liked The Thin Place better if I’d read it in one quiet sitting, on a beach, say, interrupted only by meals. The parts of it that put me off certainly didn’t blind me to the fact that it’s an extremely well-made novel. I expect that I’ll recommend it to many friends, without pretending that I was crazy about it. In any case, you can judge the result for yourself, at Portico.

¶ The Thin Place.

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Well, how do you like that? I go to the trouble to write up my latest recipe for risotto, and I have an amusing time doing so, but only to find that I wrote a page on pretty much the same subject last March. That’s research for you. Hey, I’m a convalescent!

Regular readers know that the title of this feature is ironic, in that my kitchen is too small to cook in, much less to accommodate a kitchen table. I was aching for one this weekend, though, because the kitchen was the only warm room in the apartment. The building’s heat hadn’t been turned on, so I kept the oven on at 250º. Now, however, we’re all quite agreeably toasty, and my kitchen has reverted to the chamber of horrors from which I can’t wait to escape – back to normal, in other words. Because of my delicate condition, we’re having our Sunday night special, a chicken pot pie from Eli’s. Eli’s pot pies are so good, so full of a pleasantly-sauced chicken and so sparing of vegetables, with a lovely pastry crust, that there is no point to making them oneself. At least forty percent of success in the kitchen depends on knowing what one had better buy in the store. After all, would you try to bake a batch of Triscuits? Of course not.

¶ Risotto alla Kemahnese.

All went well with the housecleaning yesterday. I moved slowly and avoided twisty situations. But then, in a near-final bit of cleanup, I reached high to replace of boxed set of Mozart’s mature string quartets in its pile atop the CD/DVD shelves in the corridor. That was a mistake. It hurt. I’m hoping it’s just muscle.

Always in search of new and difficult learning curves, I installed Coffee Cup on the laptop, to serve as my HTML editor, and I’m finding that FrontPage it ain’t. (FrontPage may not have been perfect, but I knew how to use it, which of course guaranteed that it would be discontinued.) How long it’s going to take me to figure out how to work with the new software is almost as much fun to guess at as the nature of the pain in my neck.

In a little while, Kathleen and I are going to promenade down Third Avenue to Gracious Empire, doubtless with several intermediate stops. I’ll be the guy with the tan corduroy jacket, the neck brace, the cane, the scraggly beard. and the neat wampum that Kathleen strung together for my reading glasses.

I know that I promised a risotto write-up for today – we’ll see. Maybe I’ll content myself with a PodCast – of me moaning. I can do that now! (But seriously, folks, it’s not that bad.)

Bon weekend à tous!

Yesterday, my great friend Kate, who has just retired after being, like Kathleen, too busy to live life as we know it, took me to lunch, to celebrate my speedy recovery and to catch up on the new Daily Blague &c &c. It was all about me, I’m afraid. But because Kate wanted to lunch on the early side, I decided to ditch the idea of a first-thing-in-the-morning movie in favor of taking Kathleen to see a late-ish showing of Michael Clayton, which is playing across the street. It was midnight when we got home, but I asked Kathleen if she’d mind if I had a glass of wine and composed some “notes” on the film. She assented, but I don’t really do “notes.” I ended up writing about three quarters of the finished piece more or less as it stands – and, suddenly, it was two in the morning.

I was sure that I’d ruined my carefully reconstructed bedtime rituals, but, no; a few pages of a book that I’m about to finish, with the greatest interest, knocked me out cold. The only hitch was that, when I woke up at five, I had to remember just when I’d gone to sleep, and crawl back into bed.

So we’re having a late Saturday. I’ve read the Book Review, polished off my piece about Michael Clayton, and recorded the PodCasts. There’s a fresh pot of coffee in the Chemex if anybody wants some.

¶ Michael Clayton, at Portico.

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So, I was wrong about Don Draper’s deep, dark secret. It’s not that he’s Jewish. (I tip my hat to Max.) But what, exactly, is it? What did Dick Whitman do in Korea? All right, he switched dog tags with his lieutenant officer, the real Don Draper. That’s certainly some kind of infraction. But it’s not desertion. Whatever his name, he still deserved the Purple Heart – I think. It was unclear: did the dropped cigarette lighter cause the explosion, or was it enemy gunfire? Next week: the season finale, when all is sure to be made even murkier still.

I’m not talking about the water-cooler full of crème-de-menthe when I say that the election-night party at Sterling, Cooper must have been an eye-opener for our younger demographic, to whom it may never have occurred before that anybody actually voted for Dick Nixon in 1960, much less wanted him to be President. Didn’t everyone know that Camelot was rising in the mists?

(I remember my father’s boasting that he was the only man in Bronxville who voted for Kennedy. He would continue this boast by insisting that his vote had nothing to do with shared Irish Catholicism, and certainly not with the fact that the Kennedys had lived in Bronxville, too, for a while. No, my father voted for a natural-gas-pipelines-friendly plank that LBJ brought to the party. Or so he said. My mother’s enthusiasm was more genuine. I don’t think she knew or cared a thing about Jack, but from day one she self-mockingly worshiped “Zhock-a-leen.” Despite their equestrienne girlhoods, my mother and the First Lady shared a powerful streak of American aspiration.)

Kathleen says that that Mad Men is by the far the most interesting television program that she has ever seen, “aside from Masterpiece Theatre and such.” And that’s the beauty part. Finally, American television is cranking out top-drawer shows the likes of which we’ve been importing from Britain since the repeal of the Stamp Act.

Perhaps because I’m not British, I found it difficult to follow Simon Jenkins’s review of The Cost of Democracy: Party Funding in Modern British Politics, by K D Ewing.  But the review wasn’t the important part. (“The Leader’s Cheerleaders,” London Review of Books, 20 September 2007). Mr Jenkins made his own views about party politics very clear, and it didn’t take long for my faint surprise to turn into ringing endorsement.

¶ Simon Jenkins on Party Politics, in the London Review of Books.

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Haunting me for the past month has been the 9 September 2007 issue of the New York Times Book Review, which I was to have written up on the afternoon of the tenth, after lunch. “After lunch,” however, was spent sprawled on the bedroom floor, struggling over what seemed like hours to stand up, and finding, when I could stand, that my face was pushed into my chest. Ten days later, I was wheeled into an operating room for an eight-hour procedure that – there is no justice in this world – left me better off than I’d been before. This only made the omission of the “Haitian Fathers” issue of the Book Review the more gnawing.

Why bother? Surely not just post-Catholic guilt. No. At least two regular reviewers, Liesl Schillinger and Walter Kirn, appeared in the issue, and I’m quite taken with the ability to search Portico for either of their names and have returned a comprehensive list of the books that they’ve reviewed for the Times over the past several years.

It turned out to be one of the dullest issues in living memory, with more Noes than ever before. You might for that reason find it amusing. My favorite is the one-sentence dismissal of “an opportunistic bar of soap” that got reviewed solely because Alexander Pope is a character. You know, The Jane Austen Book Club effect….

¶ Haitian Fathers.

A lot happened at the beginning of September. I came to believe that I was to some extent afflicted with Asperger’s Syndrome. Then I fell down and broke my neck, having had a few too many martinis at a bistro lunch. Putting the two together was not fun, but I’m doing well – healing very quickly, and establishing new ways of getting things done that, in truth, I’d been mulling over for months and doubtless would still be dithering over if it hadn’t been for a sudden spot of surgery. I’m doing well enough to think very hard about the irreversible mess that I almost made of my life, not because I’m a bad person but because there was some very important information about my life that I didn’t have, and because the luxury of waiting for that information to sink in and work some changes in my life was denied me.

The linked page isn’t for everybody. If it strikes you as strongly wrong-headed, or driven by some sort of denial, then please, for the love of humanity, stop reading it. It’s provisional and preliminary. I’m not ready to do much with anyone else’s experiences. But the desire to begin some serious work is very strong, and Thursday is my day for taking stock.

¶ “Wellsperger’s Models: A First Look.

Instead of reciting the titles of the three or four book that I am “reading” at the moment, here’s a summary of the pile-up on the dining table, where all the unread and unshelved books in the apartment have finally been gathered. (When Kathleen and I want to eat at the table, I move two of the piles to a TV table, and we dine in the canyon of books.

Fiction (two piles): 36 books. Should I just get rid of The Raw Shark Texts as a mistake? Or is it a mistake?

Current Events/History/General Interest: 12. This number would be a lot higher if I were a bit more rigorous about the “Miscellaneous” piles; see below.

Poetry and Criticism: 9 books. Ditto.

Biography: 10 books, including Francis Bacon’s Life of Henry VII. How precious is that?

Miscellaneous (two piles): 34 books, including Jane Eyre, which even before the midpoint strikes me as age-and gender-inappropriate, and The Upanishads.

Hopeless, isn’t it?

As for this week’s Book Review:

¶ Social Historian.

The building at the center of the photograph that is topped by a construction crane is the Greenberg Pavilion at New York Hospital, a/k/a Weill Cornell Medical Center or somesuch nonsense. (If I were Dante, I’d create a level of hell for living philanthropists deluded enough to try to glue their names on to their benefactions. As the song goes, Just You Wait, Sandy Weill, Just You Wait. I’ll get dressed and go to town.)

It’s the building in front of and below the Greenberg Pavilion that I’m off to today, at least figuratively speaking. The building with the bands of darkish windows that might seem to be the lower floors of Greenberg is actually a block closer to the camera, and it’s the Hospital for Special Surgery. Almost everyone in our very large apartment building who has heard about my broken neck has come out and asked me if I had it taken care of at “Special Surgery,” and my reply has always been a polite version of “Damn right.” This hospital, so long familiar to me as the site of a calm and quiet infusion unit (chemotherapy, without the cancer), became a “real” hospital in earnest three weeks ago, and it’s where for the first time in my life a scalpel was taken to my skin.

As it happens, the surgeon who headed the operation, and who will examine me today to see if if the wounds (not that anybody uses that word) have healed sufficiently for the two sutures to be removed (yes, only two, for an incision that’s 27 centimetres long), does not have his office in the hospital proper. My rheumatologist does. My rheumatologist’s office, together with the crammed chamber in which his two secretaries try not to step on each other as they do their work, would fit in our living room. The surgeon’s personal office is not much larger, but it is part of a vast suite of offices and examining rooms and whatnot, in a hospital annex two blocks to the north.

Kathleen is going with me, thank heaven. She was in Washington the last time I was in the surgeon’s office – when I was sent directly to the hospital as an “emergency entrant.” There is no emergency room at the Hospital for Special Surgery. Almost every patient has been suffering from some ghastly misery for ages, and is only now getting it fixed, on schedule. People who fall down and break their necks go to other hospitals, unless, like me, they’ve got some pre-existing bone problem. There aren’t that many such cases, so the hospital doesn’t really need an emergency room. But it does have procedures for “emergency entrants. ” I’m sure that it must. It certainly has an “emergency bustle.”

Did I mention that the other “emergency entrant” on the day of my admission was a woman who had just recovered from an operation sufficiently to be sent home, only to fall down in the lobby? How did that happen? Everybody leaves the hospital in a wheelchair. (I certainly did. Fossil Darling resisted the urge to push me into the East River, but we were out in the driveway by then, and he was distracted by stowing my gear in the trunk of the car. I suppose I owe my life to his ADD.) But that is what I overheard. The lady fell down in on her way out. It was too awful to think about, both for the woman and for her family.

Kathleen will be with me for however long it takes (within reason), and then she’ll go to the office, unless she insists on seeing me home. Once home (I’m painting pretty pictures here, assuming that the surgeon doesn’t discover any ill consequences of my having moved the Steinway grand), I shall reread vast swathes of Alexander Waugh’s Fathers and Sons, so that I can write it up. It is just the sort of book for me right now. The author’s father and grandfather compensated for the discomforts of life with alcohol and extreme wit. Mr Waugh, in contrast, appears to have a more gently cynical spirit, more inclined to smile with an intense frown than to say, as his father did of tourists from the Midlands who, in his opinion, besmirched his beloved Somerset with their litter,

The roads of West Somerset are jammed as never before with caravans from birmingham and the West Midlands. Their horrible occupants only come down here to search for a place where they can go to the lavatory free. Then they return to Birmingham, boasting in their hideous flat voices about how much money they have saved.

I don’t suppose many of the brutes can read, but anybody who wants a good book for the holidays is recommended to try a new publication form the Church Information Office: <i>The Churchyard Handbook.</i> It laments the passing of that ancient literary form, the epitaph, suggesting that many tombstones put up nowadays dedicated to “Mum” or “Dad” or “Ginger” would be more suitable for a dog cemetery than for the resting place of Christians.

The trouble is that people can afford tombstones nowadays who have no business to be remembered at all. Few of these repulsive creatures in caravans are Christians, I imagine, but I would happily spend the rest of my days composing epitaphs for them in exchange for a suitable fee.:

He had a shit on Gwennap Head,
It cost him nothing. Now he’s dead.

He left a turd on Porlock Hill
As he lies here, it does there still.

Write such things today, and you’ll be given the Carol Gotbaum treatment.

And when I’m through with Mr Waugh – or he with me – I’ve got eight other books to write up next. I’ll have to re-read them all in order to say anything halfway intelligent. In this way, I promise to spend the balance of my time here below, never lifting anything heavier than a pretzel stick – I promise!

HAPPY UPDATE:

The suture has been removed. There were actually two sutures, but the barber appears to have shaved off the one at the top of my neck, so we’ll just live with that bit of blue thread. Another suture, complete overlooked these past three weeks so far as dressing and cleaning is concerned, was removed from an incision over my pelvis. That’s where they got the bit of gushy interior-bone stuff that I became familiar with while watching Manda Bala. 

The surgeon, Dr Andrew Sama himself, showed up to congratulate me on my speedy recovery. It was a good thing that Kathleeen came along, because she wouldn’t have believed me if I’d told her that he said that I can fly, as long as I wear my brace. This means that Kathleen may get to see some sun on or around Thanksgiving after all.

I am one hell of a lucky guy. Once again, though, thanks for all your good wishes. They helped!

All right, not exactly at Hell’s Gate. But it’s there in the background, roiling treacherously between the Triboro Bridge (vehicular traffic) and Hell Gate Bridge (railway). Can you tell that I’m losing weight? I can, sort of. My clothes are beginning to hang on me. Which is just too bad – most of them are still new.

A word about the neck brace: it is filthy. The padded parts are covered in some sort of nylon-esque material that, after I’d worn the brace for a week, began to irritate the hell out of my skin. What to do? I learned to fold a piece of cotton flour-sack towelling into a triangle and to arrange it around my neck like a Colonial-Dame kerchief. Now the only part of my anatomy that the brace comes into contact with is the beard under my chinny-chin chin. That itches, sometimes like the dickens, but it does not raise red splotches on my shoulders. Now that the brace is so much more comfortable, I’ve come to feel rather naked and unprotected without it.

As I stood with my back to the East River, here’s what I could see just beyond Kathleen, who kindly took the picture. This is Gracie Mansion, the famous mayoral residence that the current incumbent has declined to inhabit, preferring his doubtless far more comfortable East 70s town house. As a result, the house is still haunted by the ashes of the Giuliani-Hanover marriage.

Being a native New Yorker, I’ve never taken a tour of the house. Kathleen almost went to a party there, during the Lindsay Administration, but something went disastrously wrong, and I don’t think it was the weather.

 

As we promenaded along the Finley Walk, we were diverted by the small-dog run. It is so different from the large-dog run that one’s tempted to thnk of a division in species. The big dogs gallop through thick sand and over rocks and rails in pursuit of tennis balls and one another’s rear ends. They outnumber owners, it always seems, by three to one. At the small-dog run, it’s the other way round. The people are much more parent-like, not protective so much as admiring. The small dogs are, after all, cute. I’m not sure why they rate the plastic tile, which I’m sure the big dogs would detest. But the sound of their little nails clicking across the blue surface is comical in itself.

Kathleen and I both like this photograph a lot. There’s the promenade on top, with one level of highway below. The reason for the rise in the promenade is the dip of the southbound lane of the FDR below the northbound lane – three levels in all for most of the run. I remember loving these “tunnels” when I was a child, on the rare occasions when my parents would come into Manhattan via the East Side, but I was over thirty years old before I knew what stood on top of them.

“I hope that we never live far from here,” I said to Kathleen. “I don’t think that we will,” she said, making my day.

Fifteen years ago, the cinquecentennial of a certain “discovery” in 1492 was brushed over by pundits everywhere: Columbus had become an embarrassment to a militantly post imperial age. I couldn’t help thinking that it was just bad timing, and today I am proved right, by a story in the Times by Amy Harmon, “Seeking Columbus’s Origins With a Swab.”

In 2004, a Spanish geneticist, Dr. Jose A. Lorente, extracted genetic material from a cache of Columbus’s bones in Seville to settle a dispute about where he was buried. Ever since, he has been beset by amateur historians, government officials and self-styled Columbus relatives of multiple nationalities clamoring for a genetic retelling of the standard textbook tale.

The Times lists, in graphic form, the five most likely theories of Columbus’s background: the Genoese, the Catalan, the Portuguese, the Majorcan, and the Jewish. At the bottom of this list, there’s a lovely bouquet of other possibilities, one that ends with the Times’s own Manhattan-inflected whimsy:

Columbus may have been the son of Pope Innocent VIII or the King of Poland. He may trace his origin to the Balaeric island of Ibiza, or the Mediterranean island of Corsica [!!!!!]. He could be from Greece or Norway. Or. for that matter, from anywhere that people have DNA.

D’you see what I mean about timing? in 1992, Columbus was the European oppressor of indigenous Americans. But, just as there was hardly any Internet in those long-ago days (1992, not 1492), so the sleuthing possibilities of DNA had hardly begun to register on the popular consciousness. Now, however, having discovered for certain that “Anna Andersen” was not the Archduchess Anastasia of Russia, the world is clamoring to establish the true nature of Columbus’s own indigenuity.

Tessa Hadley’s The Master Bedroom is one of those extraordinarily beautiful novels that defy easy criticism. Ms Hadley’s distinct grasp of the individual’s unique psychology approached the fullness of poetry while avoiding the florid and the opaque. With an almost painful immediacy, her characters recede into the dimness of lost friends even though the outlines of their predicament remains. I should be very happy to have had this novel read aloud to me.

¶ The Master Bedroom.

While I wouldn’t claim to be the worst convalescent in the world, I’m certainly a very bad one. Instead of sitting quietly, reading away, doing nothing more strenuous than writing the occasional blog entry, I have been reorganizing my entire life. Stop drinking a gallon of martinis a day, and you’ll probably start reorganizing things, too. Most of the reorganization hasn’t required any heavy lifting, but…

I don’t want to think about that. My head is still erect and, if my shoulders hurt a little, they ought to. I took it much easier today than I did yesterday, which I took much easier than I did Friday – on which day I was idleness itself compared to Thursday. On Thursday, I learned how to do the podcast thingy, and that was so exciting that I had to move the Steinway grand from the blue room to the living room….

I exaggerate; there is no Steinway grand. But I did find an electronic keyboard tucked away behind some draperies. Two years ago, at least, I promised this unused article to some friends of friends who were thinking of buying one for their little boy, who is undoubtedly in law school by now. It was very embarrassing, not being able to find the keyboard where I thought I’d put it. I also found a portrait of me painted by an artist whom we used to know. It is a fiercely expressionistic work – my beard is a sort of creamy teal, while my face is painted the same red as my flannel shirt – but we find it a good likeness (a gallon of martinis per diem will do that to your flannel shirts). We really don’t have anywhere to hang the picture, and I don’t know what to do with it. But it’s not going back behind the draperies. One of my many new mottoes is: No Hidden Assets.

It was my intention to share a risotto recipe with you this evening, but what with one thing another… the day went so quickly. There were the weekend papers to read, and a novel to finish, and a long walk to take (Kathleen estimates it at two miles). Then there was dinner to make. My default, brain-dead menu: roast chicken, some sort of pasta with butter and parmesan, and a vegetable, in tonight’s case deliciously overcooked asparagus. For once, I said “to hell with the al dente school of asparagus,” and I let the tips steam for as long as the elbow macaroni took to boil, seven minutes. That’s much too long, according to current fashions, but it was just what we wanted. We got all the crunch anybody could ask for from the sinfully crispy chicken skin.

While I was in hospital, the beautiful bead chain that Kathleen made some time back for my reading glasses got caught in the neck brace and broke. The beads spilled everywhere, but we recovered most of them; some, I’m embarrassed to say, from the folds of my body. (I’d never have known they were there, but Fossil Darling was giving me an assist in the bathroom. This was shortly after he considered knifing me; see below.) I have become fatally dependent not only upon reading glasses but upon the chain from which they hang when I don’t need them, which is most of the time. For two days – I lost the store-bought backup at the movies on Friday; it was on its last legs, and I didn’t even miss it until I was on the IRT headed north from Union Square – I’ve been taking off the reading glasses and – dropping them on the floor! Not to mention looking all over the apartment for them.

Tomorrow, Columbus Day, is a local, New York holiday. Kathleen’s firm, headquartered in Chicago, does not recognize it, but she’s taking the day off anyway. Fossil Darling, who has the day off anyway – he works for a a well-known umbrella firm – will be junketing to the neighborhood for a haircut. We’re planning a penitential luncheon afterward, which should be very jolly for all the souls in Purgatory whom we’ll be speeding heaven-ward. Maybe someone will take pictures – if the crime scene is sufficiently gory. If she could read this (and who’s to say she can’t, FD’s sainted, late mother would be clucking, not for the first time in forty-four years, “Oh, you two!”

A sordid confession: I almost fell asleep well into The Darjeeling Limited yesterday. I blame this on early hours and a diet of painkillers, but you may draw other conclusions. I did manage to eat all my popcorn; maybe I needed a post-prandial snooze. But it is also true that I had given up, by this point, on the possibility of seeing something new and different. It’s an awful thought, but there is nothing about Owen Wilson’s role or performance in Wes Anderson’s latest film that would make a suicide attempt seem improbable.

I did tell Fossil Darling that I wasn’t recommending the movie to him, because if he took me up on a good recommendation, he would first shoot everyone else in the audience before hunting me down with his snicker snee.

Can it possibly be true that smoking is no longer permitted on Indian trains?

¶ The Darjeeling Limited.

Podcasts:

(Note: As the first “real” podcast at The Daily Blague, I resolved to upload the first take, no matter how much it might be improved. One learns little from preliminary perfectionism. I, in contrast, learned a lot – but I’m letting the recording stand, warts and all. For some reason, I call the character played by Owen Wilson, Francis, “Patrick.” That’s the sort of thing that I’ll be cleaning up ahead of time in future. And I shall try to get the volume louder. )

The Darjeeling Limited (RSS)
The Darjeeling Ltd (MP3)