The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.

So opens The Go-Between, a novel originally published in 1953. Every once in a while, I read a novel that I’ve heard about but not gotten round to, and it is so good, so well-done, so satisfying, so much the compleat English novel that I wince with painful embarrassment. How could I have been such a moron, not to read this book sooner? The Go-Between is one of those books.

The NYRB reprint (2002) sports a startling blurb by Ian McEwan:

The famous formulation about the past sets the tone: this is a strange and beautiful book. I first read it in my early teens, and its atmosphere for yearning for lost times and of childish innocence challenged has haunted me ever since.

That’s got to be the literary understatement of the decade. Mr McEwan had just published Atonement, an obvious hommage to Hartley’s novel.

The weather this morning was beautiful: clear, crisp, sunny, and inviting. High atmospheric pressure cheered one into standing up and getting going. That’s how Fall is in the Northeast: we snap out of the stupor of August (and early September!) and remember how many interesting things there are in the world. It’s a seasonal response conditioned, long ago, by the promises of new courses, new teachers — and another chance to be a better-organized student.

Making breakfast this morning, I slipped the first disc of the first season of The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show into the kitchen television. (By far the most-watched screen in the house, it is unconnected to the outside world). What enormous fun this show still is! The nation trembles as an invasion of Moon Men impends (of course it’s just Rocky and Bullwinkle). An announcer advises listeners to panic: “This is not a play,” a sweet reference (considering the age of the target audience) to Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds hoax twenty-one years earlier. Meanwhile, two straphangers discuss the situation. The most surprising thing about the show is its presumption that everyone lives in New York City: subways don’t require explanation. Neither does the tone of the discussion. “So, what else is new?” shrugs one of the men. When genuine Moon Men arrive — largely to thwart the onslaught of lunar tourism — Rocky asks Bullwinkle if he’s ever seen such strange creatures. Bullwinkle shrugs: “Maybe they’re Congressmen.” With Rocky and Bullwinkle, the noble Warner Bros tradition of aiming adult humor over the heads of innocent children, nurtured in California, came back home to Brooklyn. (more…)

¶ Matins: John McCain has delivered himself over to the Republican Party handlers whose only objective is a victory for the Party. They’re not taking a chance on Senator McCain (whom they’ve never cared for anyway). No more Mr Nice Guy.

¶ Lauds: Crayons!

¶ Tierce: A while back — at Sext on 10 March, to be exact — I took one of my occasional fliers, and accused today’s right-leaning Federal judiciary of seeking to overturn progressive commercial-law decisions from the early Twentieth Century that underpin our consumer economy. I was teeny-tinily overstating, and if anybody had called me on it, I’d have been obliged to temporize.

No longer. Adam Liptak reports on the so-called “pre-emption doctrine,” a wildly pro-business, anti-consumer principle that is wholly consonant with what we know about Republican Party objectives.

¶ Sext: For seventeen years, Dan Hanna took two self-snaps a day, making one full turn every year. The Time of My Life is stop-action animation with a vengeance! From 31 to 48, Mr Hanna ages very well, but still….  (via kottke.org)

¶ Vespers: Hats off to Jessica Stockton Bagnulo, who is halfway to opening a bookstore in Fort Greene with strong support from the business community, from a $15,000 first prize in a Citibank competition to her business partner, a Random House sales rep.

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¶ Two of Lord Chesterfield’s letters today; one to Bubb Dodington, a fellow Tory, about Parliamentary maneuverings. An auld lament:

I entirely agree with you, that we ought to have meetings to concert measures some time before the meeting of the Parliament; but that, I likewise know, will not happen. I have been these seven years endeavouring to bring it about, and have not been able; fox-hunting, gardening, planting, or indifference having always kept our people in the country, till the very day before the meeting of the Parliament.

In a letter to his son, Chesterfield tries to make the case for paying attention by painting a humorous portrait of the inattentive man, who trips over his sword when he enters a room, eats with his knife, &c. Did it make little Philip Stanhope laugh? (more…)

After a few months of simply playing the Nanos that I’ve already loaded with classical music — Opera (Pink), Fave Classics (Green), Baroque (Red), and Other (Blue) — I’ve gone back to the drawing board on creating playlists.

The Fave Classics program took months to build, because I was trying to automate the iTunes playlist by assigning each work its own album name, so that lining the works up in alphabetical order would also line them up in program order. Organizing the program by means of artificial album titles also allowed me to print a playlist, which seemed important at the time.

Over time, I got to be more comfortable with iTunes playlists — and I began to get tired of my elaborately constructed programs. The Fave Classics, by its very nature, held up well. I more or less loved everything on it, and it took a week to play. But I hardly ever played the Other (Blue) Nano. It was loaded with things that I had to be in the mood for. I began to see the need for greater flexibility in creating programs.

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¶ Matins: At the surgeon’s this morning, I did not even think of asking about the consequences of doing nothing. First of all, it would have been grotesquely histrionic. If you’re dying, maybe it’s all right to say “Let me go.” But my cancer is still stuck on my scalp, from which it will probably be removed without incident.

¶ Lauds: Ben Brantley said something yesterday that threw me for a complete loop:

All artists steal from others. But if the resulting work holds your attention, you don’t consider its sources while you’re watching it.

Wow! Is that ever crazy wrong!

¶ Tierce: I am crazy about Gail Collins.

And since McCain’s willingness to make speeches that have nothing to do with his actual beliefs is not matched by an ability to give them, he wound up sounding like Bob Dole impersonating Huey Long.

Dang, I wish I’d written that!

¶ Nones: There are a lot of things that I’d like to see parents jailed for permitting, but truancy is probably a good start.

¶ Compline: A recent British survey suggests that parents in only one family in three are reading to children. In my book, not reading to children isn’t just child abuse but antisocial behavior. (more…)

In the middle of the Morning Read today, I discovered that the water in our line of apartments was shut off, would remain shut off for about two hours. I threw on some clothes and walked over to the Museum, partly to have lunch, also to take another look at my favorite Turner painting in the show that’s closing this weekend (Approach to Venice, Exh RA 1844), but mostly to walk into the Park to take some photographs for next week’s Daily Office. Because I’d had a bit of a walk yesterday, my legs began to complain as I came round the Museum toward Fifth Avenue — I’d the bright idea of walking the perimeter of the Museum, taking two sets of photographs (for two weeks of DO’s — pletty crevel, no?). I’d have taken a taxi home, but I was in no hurry to find out that the water was still off. Limping up to the building, I asked Dominic, the doorman on duty, to find out the status of my water supply, lest I have to go round to the Food Emporium to buy some Poland Spring. Never has a thumbs-up been so welcome as Dominic’s report.

Cleaned up and comfortably seated, I found that I could hardly pay attention to what I was reading. I wanted only to sleep. My impressions are correspondingly lackluster.

¶ Lord Chesterfield writes to his son (a boy of seven) about Roman History. (more…)

¶ Matins: It’s too bad that this somewhat meandering piece about depression and sadness and the persistent difficulty of deciding how to treat them appeared so soon after the suicide — a depression-related death, by all accounts — of David Foster Wallace and yet does not mention him.

¶ Lauds: When my globetrotting correspondent Gawain wrote to me from Lisbon, retailing the pleasures of that city, I remembered that I had wanted to read The Maias, by José Maria Eça de Queirós. So I ordered it from Amazon, and began reading it yesterday.

¶ Tierce: What percentage of American voters, do you think, is unaware that our diplomatic relations with Venezuela have been severely curtailed? What percentage is aware that Bolivia is falling apart — and that the United States supports (as it does in Venezuela) the losing side? Simon Romero’s brief report in today’s Times shows Bolivia breaking up on several fronts, from oil royalties to drugs.

¶ Nones: While I’m unwilling to waste my time attacking The Infernal Machine — Sarah Palin is doing a dandy job of living up to the nickname that I slapped on her the day she was nominated — but I would be happy to see billboards plastered with her extraordinarily degraded syntax. Has the woman ever finished a sentence? She makes Dubya sound — presidential.

In the current New Yorker, Philip Gourevitch registers an interesting dissonance in Ms Palin’s speech.

Trooper Wooten has admitted to Tasering the boy and shooting the moose, and he was disciplined for these things within the department, but, under the union contract, he could not be fired at the Governor’s whim. (He had been cleared of the threat to Palin’s father, but disciplined for drinking and driving, which he still denies.) It was obvious that this continued to frustrate Palin. She also seemed to forget that you should not talk about your affairs when they’re under investigation. Troopergate was the one subject about which she seemed keen to explicate the details. She wanted to persuade me that firing Walt Monegan had nothing to do with Trooper Wooten; that it was in no way a conflict of interest or an abuse of power. But, as she spoke, she seemed to be saying something else—that her vendetta against Wooten was wholly justified.

But for the true flavor of the Machine’s façon de parler, one turns a few pages back in the magazine, to George Saunders’s “My Gal.” (more…)

With two very strong non-fiction titles in this week’s issue, I might be thought curmudgeonly for heaving yet another sigh of discontent. But, oh, the fiction: five out of six reviews are almost soporifically uninteresting.

¶ Matins: As the financial collapse continues, I rather egotistically wish that I had the time and energy to comb through old Portico pages in search of I-told-you-so’s. Isn’t that stupid. Let’s say I did. Let’s say I foresaw the whole mess, exactly as it’s playing out (which I most certainly did not). So what? A good idea ahead of its time is really just another bad idea.

¶ Tierce: Patrick McGeehan files a lucid report on the environmental impact, so to speak, of Wall Street’s latest melt-down. It will be bad for the city, of course, but it will be worse for the suburbs — which were already beginning to suffer the tribulations of increased oil prices (home heating and gasoline).

¶ Nones: Two funny videos today: The Cult of the Cupcake and Les Misbarack.

¶ Vespers: Notwithstanding the global gloom and doom, Damien Hirst shattered auction records the other night, bypassing his dealer and going directly to the public. Maybe that’s what you do in a crunch. Carol Jacobi writes in the Guardian about how Holman Hunt did just about the same thing in 1866, in the middle of a bank run. (more…)

Just wait till you see what Harry Pfarrer’s making in his basement! Don’t miss it!

¶ Matins: Why do we all feel that the failure of Lehman Brothers is so much worse than everything that has happened before, from Black Monday (1987) to the collapse of Enron? Why do we suspect that, this time, the disaster may engulf us?

¶ Tierce: Floyd Norris on lax financial regulation:

Those who were complaining, only months ago, that excessive regulation was making American markets uncompetitive, had it exactly wrong. It was a lack of regulation of the shadow financial system and its players that allowed this to happen. The regulators might not have gotten it right if they had tried to put limits on leverage, or assure that it was clear what risks were being taken, in the world of derivatives and securitizations. But deciding not to even try, and assuming that risks traded secretly would somehow end up in the hands of those most able to bear them, reflected ideology, not analysis.

¶ Sext: Read about Palisade Prep, a new public high school in Yonkers, funded in part by the Gates Foundation, that aims to send every student to college.

Rosa Kastsaridis, whose 15-year-old son, Frank, is a ninth grader at the school, said the available counseling was an important factor in her decision to take a chance on a promising — but untested — school.

“I graduated from the Yonkers school system 17 years ago and wasn’t able to get a scholarship because the guidance counselor at that time was not educated enough to help me,” she said.

¶ Compline: Today’s one of those days when reading about the horreurs du jour through the elegant francophonie of Jean Ruaud’s Mnémoglyphes is like a comfort from the Psalms.

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Why, I wonder, did Joseph O’Neill recommend this book to me? Why did it pop into his mind? Had he just read it himself? Or was it a long-time favorite? A novel that came out when he was twelve years old… In any case, I was glad to read The Easter Parade.

¶ The Réflexions Morales of François de la Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac (1613-1680), begins by striking what I expect will be the characteristic deflationary note:

Ce que nous prenons pour des vertus n’est souvent qu’un assemblage de diverses actions et de diverses intérêts, que la fortune ou notre industrie savent arranger; et ce n’est pas toujours par valeur et par chasteté que les hommes sont vaillants, et que les femmes sont chastes.

What we take to be virtue is often nothing more than an mass of diverse acts and interests arranged by fortune or our shrewdness; and it is not always by valor and chastity that men are valiant and women are chaste.

This has a cynical, post-modern ring. If bravery and modesty are in fact accidental appearances, ought anybody to try to be brave or modest? (more…)

 

A touch of fall in the air last week tempted me to trundle the portable room air-conditioner off into the closet, but I wasn’t so foolish. One shiver does not an autumn make. This mid-September weekend has come straight out of summer. At the market today, I noticed a lot of very cross women, complaining about the heat to their cell phones. Walking home, I took my time and stuck to the shady side of the street, but I was dripping when I got home. Sitting down in the chilled blue room, with a fan to boot, will probably undo my defenses to Kathleen’s cold, which has kept her very quiet since Thursday evening.

LXIV accompanied me to the movies on Friday morning. I almost canceled, because New Yorker Festival tickets went on sale at noon, but in the end I decided to give the Festival a pass, for the second year. I liked going for the first few years, but I overdid it in 2006, and felt rather like a groupie-in-training. I have never understood the reading part of author readings. Many writers are no good at all at reading their own work, while others — I’m thinking of Gary Shteyngart here — are so vivid and entertaining that you wonder if their books aren’t simply scripts for great performances. Discussions are find, but what I like most are Q & A sessions. I’ll ask a question if I can think of a good one, but I like watching writers speak ex tempore. And then there’s the signing at the end. That’s a feature that the New Yorker Festival events omit.

Ms NOLA called me last night with the news of David Foster Wallace’s suicide. I liked the man’s non-fiction very much, but I never even tried to read Infinite Jest. I will miss his voice, which was both very funny and very learned. Considering the state of the union today, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that he was finding it difficult to be funny and learned these days. As we slip into something like a shogunate, with Republican Party pooh-bahs manipulating elected officials in the exploitation of the res publica, we have a greater need than ever for critics who are learned and funny. (I don’t know what Wallace’s politics were, but his teaching post at Claremont College in Pomona suggests that he was not a radical leftist.)

Yielding to more purely personal trends, I decided to stop writing up Friday movies in time for Saturday publication. I want the weekends for myself, and the weekend begins when the Friday morning movie lets out. “For myself” means “for reading.” Instead of writing up Burn After Reading on Friday afternoon, I read Home, Marilynne Robinson’s radiant concurrence to Gilead. When I finished the book last night, it was a good thing to have a box of Kleenex by my chair. Tears flooded my eyes the moment they weren’t required for reading.

On my daily round of links, I came across a reference to something called “Larchmont Lockjaw” [not at this site]. I sat up like a shot, because of course the manner of speaking referred to — best characterized as speaking through clenched teeth, so that one’s jaw remains stationary — is not called “Larchmont Lockjaw.” It is called “Locust Valley Lockjaw.” In tribute to its best known exponent, Katharine Hepburn, it probably ought to be called “Hartford Lockjaw.”

But, Larchmont! The very idea! Larchmont’s one claim to fame is that nobody knows whether it is to the North or to the South of Mamaroneck. Yes, I know — you can look it up and tell me! But you will forget! It is impossible to distinguish the Tweedledee and the Tweedledum of Westchester country living.

Locust Valley is on the other side of Long Island Sound. It is, therefore, on Long Island. (On the evidence of the Web site, however, I rather doubt that the patois is spoken there anymore.)

If you want to know what Locust Valley Lockjaw sounds like, let your Auntie Mame help out. It’s the way that young Patrick’s would-be fiancée, Gloria Upson, melds her incisors. “And then I hit the ball….”

¶ Matins: Midnight finds me unprepared with an interesting link, so I have to go with this nonsense, which I link to as such. (Laff riot!) I’ve been chatting with a friend about the election, more and more convinced that the United States is a broken wheel, an idea that will never work again.

¶ Lauds: I knew about Stella, but not about Mary, who, like her mother, Linda Eastman McCartney, is a photographer. I came across her name at the Guardian site, where she talks about her best shot (below).

¶ Prime: Feeling jazzy? Dreaming of kidney beans? Well, then, download some Mad Men-inspired wallpaper. (via kottke.org)

¶ Tierce: David Gonzalez writes about the “morality” of double-parking — the theory being one of justification by acclamation: “everybody does it.”

¶ Vespers: Boy, do I need to lie down! I’ve just scrolled through all fifty-four pairs of New York’s then-and-now photos showing recent changes in local streetscapes. (via kottke.org)

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It’s all I can do to keep from pulling down Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead in order to perk up my recollection of the details of Jack Boughton’s difficult life, as told, in that book, by his father’s best friend, the very disapproving Jack Ames. Instead, I’m letting Home refresh my memories. Home, we’re told, relates events “concurrently” from the point of view of Jack’s sister, Glory, a good woman who has seen more of life than her family suspects. Glory has come back to Gilead to take care of her ailing, widowed father — but that isn’t the whole story. The whole story unspools in what can only be called immense narrative piety.

She thought. Yes, a little like the old times. Graying children, ancient father. If they could have looked forward from those old times, when even a game of checkers around that table was so rambunctious it would have driven her father off to parse his Hebrew in the stricken quiet of Ames’s house — if they could now look in the door of the kitchen at the three of them there, would they believe what they saw? No matter — her father was hunched over his side of the board, mock-intent, and Jack was reclined, legs crossed at the ankles, as if it were possible to relax in a straighted-backed chair. The popcorn popped.

In the best sense in the world, Marilynne Robinson is a great respecter of persons.