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 was too cold, yesterday, to wander far from home in search of film fare, so I didn’t head downtown for The Orphanage or across town for There Will Be Blood. So I went across the street and gorged on the latest box of romantic comedy from Hollywood. Tears poured out of my eyes all though the movie, so perhaps it was in revenge that I came home and dished it. Don’t listen to me, though. Be sure to see Hilary Swank pull off another boffo performance.

¶ PS I Love You.

The three façades of One Gracie Square. Can you tell which one is Neocon? Theocon? Anti-tax?

On the eve of the Iowa caucuses, a little focus won’t hurt you. I’ve tried to put Michael Tomasky’s election-in-a-nutshell into an even smaller nutshell.

¶ Michael Tomasky on the Republican Faction, in The New York Review of Books.

MP3      RSS

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.

As we begin a new year of reading, I wonder how my own book list will track the ones that appear in the Times at the end of the year. If I was looking for official validation of my judgment in 2007, the Times was not there to provide it. Each year, the Book Review selects ten best books, to which the principal critics of the daily paper add another thirty. I read only one of the Book Review’s best books (Joshua Ferris’s wonderful Then We Came To The End), and I owned only one of the daily’s thirty (Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes, about the CIA). Worse, I realized that if anyone asked me for a list of the ten best books of the year, I wouldn’t be able to answer off the top of my head — although I would certainly mention Mr Ferris’s book. It occurs to me that list-building is not an activity to reserve for December.

What with the holidays, I haven’t been reading very much. The bedside pile just gets higher. What’s dispiriting isn’t so much the rising altitude itself as the incongruity between enjoying reading and feeling compelled to consume books. One instinct puts books in the pile while the other tries to knock them out. It also bothers me that there seems to be no plan behind my reading choices; it’s just one damned thing after another. Now, that’s something to work on in 2008. It’s certainly more important than deciding what the “best books” were. 

As for this week’s Book Review,

¶ Strong Opinions.

If Michael Bloomberg runs for prexy and wins, will he treat the White House as he has treated Gracie Mansion?

The reflexive inclination to wish everyone a Happy New Year! is muted somewhat by the recollection that 2008 brings a presidential election. After all that we’ve been through in the past seven years, the elation that one might normally feel is difficult to summon. I dare not express my fondest wish, beyond hinting that it would be great if the ceremonial occupant of the modest mansion shown above won the right to pass up another, rather more famous home on an avenue beginning with the letter “P.” The man likes town houses, it seems; didn’t the Truman’s live at Blair House?