Colm Tóibín’s story in this week’s New Yorker, “The Color of Shadows,” would not have been out of place in his short-story collection, Mothers and Sons, although not only does the mother not make an appearance but we never really know why. An old friend tells Paul, the son — one of Mr T’s virtual orphans —

“It was awful what happened, of course, and I knew your mother well.”

But we’re not told what happened. It seems to have involved drink. Paul presumably knows, but that recollection does present itself in his thoughts. The important thing is that he did not know what happened when it happened — when he was a boy, and his late father’s sister, Josie, took him in.

Josie made sure that he was happy and that he studied hard. As soon asit became obvious that he was good at maths and science, she learned everything she could about careers for him and what points he would need. She paid for grinds so that he would have honours in maths and thus gain entrance to University College, Dublin, to study engineering.

The story is framed by Josie’s departure from the house in which she raised Paul, and by her death, several years later, in the nursing home run by the friend who knew his mother well. Paul finds the house, without Josie, to have “a smell of damp and old cooking.”

When he went upstairs and looked at his old bedroom, he noticed how worn the carpet was and how the color on the wallpaper had faded. He must, he thought, have noticed this before, but now the room seemed shabby and strange, almost unfamiliar, and not the room he had slept in every night throughout his childhood, with the small desk in the corner where he did his homework.

This passage comes back to me as one of the story’s most insistent, bringing to life as it does the small boy, bent over his books, the “home” in “homework” as salient as the smell of old cooking.

We’re not told what Paul’s mother did, or why she abandoned her son. But this is not a mystery that the reader must clear up. (The reader can easily imagine any number of sordid fait divers.) Rather, it’s Paul’s sense of the mystery that impinges. He may know “what happened,” but he will never comprehend it. In the language of healing, he might come to “understand” it well enough, and forgive his mother, if that’s what’s to be done, even though he goes on refusing to contact her. (For she is not dead.) But what he understands is the world that Josie brought him up in.

He remembered her always as a middle-aged woman with gray hair, someone content as long as nothing new or unusual was happening, someone always happier in her own house when the day was over and everything was in its place.

There is no room for Paul’s mother in such a world, or in such an understanding of the world. And yet it cannot be said that Josie took the place of his mother. There is no trace of the American disregard for facts; no doting aunt declaring, “I’m your mother now.” There is all the caring in the world, but no mother’s love — or whatever it is that mothers have to offer. She may never be mentioned between Josie and Paul, but she is not effaced; and she is there at the end.

Her life and the one that he had lived apart from her filled his mind now, as though a space had been made for them, the shadows cleared, by what hapd happened in the night and by Josie’s going. He found himself inhaling and releasing breath as a way of nourishing that space, and he breathed in hard for a second at the thought that nourishing it like this was maybe all he would be able to do with it.

¶ Matins: Matt Richtel and Bob Tedeschi filed an interesting report at the Times on Sunday: people will pay for apps for their phone that they can download onto their computers for free. And guess what. The mobile services collect nickels and dimes without breaking a sweat. In other words: Micropayments are here.

¶ Lauds: Matt Trueman is looking for young critics — in the West End. Where are they?

Let us remember that Kenneth Tynan was 25 when he took up the post in 1952 that is to be vacated by de Jongh, before graduating to the Observer only two years later. And, it was a 26-year-old Michael Billington that first reviewed for the Times in 1965.

¶ Prime: “How Not to Photograph” — a series of drolly incisive blog entries by British photographer Colin Pantall. (via  kottke.org)

¶ Tierce: Did Giampaolo Giuliani, a technician at an Italian nuclear physics lab, predict the catastrophic quake at L’Aquila, or was his announcement just a fluke? (Remember radon?) (via  The Morning News)

¶ Sext: For a few years in the mid-Eighties, I worked in an office at 1 Broadway. For me, it was the acme of workplaces. Photos from Scouting NYC — not surprisingly, Scout sees things that I missed.

¶ Nones: A lucid analysis by journalist Asli Aydintasbas of the knack that American leaders, up to but not including President Obama, have had for getting Turkey wrong. (Hint: talk of “moderate Islam” irritates everybody.)

¶ Vespers: It used to be that publishers printed books. Ancient history — except at the most ancient continually-operating publisher in the world, the Cambridge University Press, founded by Henry VIII in 1534. The lithographic CUP is losing £2,000,000 a year.

¶ Compline: It’s a first, all right, and I hope that it lasts. I wish it were the last. The Vermont legislature has overridden a gubernatorial veto to enact same-sex marriage. No judicial activism required this time!

(more…)

¶ Lord Chesterfield advises his son to stay in touch with one Lord Pulteney, who is not only good-natured and a man of parts but —

but there is also a third reason, which, in the course of the world, is not to be despised; his father cannot live long, and will leave him an immense fortune: which, in all events, will make him of some consequence, and if he has parts into the bargain, of very great consequence; so that his friendship may be extremely well worth your cultivating, especially as it will not cost you above one letter in one month.

This calculating will make many readers bristle — or perhaps it will be the teaching of a younger person to make such calculations that offends. It sounds incompatible with our idea that friendship ought to be disinterested. But friendship is never disinterested, or we should make friends with anyone and everyone. What is the difference between a friend’s charm, intelligence, and great wealth? The last attribute, we feel, doesn’t belong on a par with with the first two, but that, I daresay, is wishful thinking. It’s vanity, too: we flatter ourselves to think that we would be who were are without the advantages of healthy upbringing, material comforts, and so on.

¶ In Moby-Dick, Tashtego falls into the “tun” of spermaceti. Truly objectionable comparisons to childbirth are made: “Midwifery should be taught in the same course with fencing and boxing, riding and rowing.” This jocularity is followed by a chapter that blends whale- worhip with phrenology.

Genius in the Sperm Whale? Has the Sperm Whale ever written a book, spoken a speech? No, his great genius is declared by his doing nothing particular to prove it. It is moreover declared in his pyradmidal silence.

The last bit leads Melville into a flight of fancy about how the Egyptians would have deified the whale (had they known whales) for the same reason that they deified the crocodile: no tongue. What self-indulgent twaddle!

¶ In Don Quixote, Quixote and Sancho encounter a troupe of actors, and for a moment it looks as though the knight errant is going to challenge them to some sort of contest. But, no: this is the Second Part, far less bumptious than the First. Quixote is persuaded to rise above a perceived slight. Phew! But a player in motley scares Rocinante, and the poor knight’s bones are bruised in yet another fall.

¶ In Squillions, Alexander Woollcott dies (with his boots on), and Noël writes about the annealing aspect of London life in wartime.

We are aware in our minds all the time that invasion, either by us or by the enemy, is imminent and might occur at any moment. We are aware all the time that only twenty miles separates us from the enemy and that, however many plays we play and however many jokes we make and however many lunches we may have at the “Ivy” or “Apéritif” or Savoy or Claridges, that anything might happen at any minutes and it is the fact that we are all subconsciously prepared for this that makes the difference that I am trying, so unsuccessfully, to explain.

Not unsuccessfully at all.

¶ Matins: Frank Rich insists that singer John Rich is mistaken:  Detroit is no more “the real world” than Wall Street is.”

¶ Lauds: Rachel Morarjee conducts a Monocle tour of the “narcotecture” of Herat. For more than half of the clip’s five minutes, the richest city in Afghanistan looks like any old place after a scattershot disaster, but at the three-minute market, brace yourself for “wedding-cake monstrosities.” (via  Things Magazine)

¶ Prime: While critic Tom Service laments the decline in British music education, &c and so forth, Jeremy Denk illustrates what a top-drawer education can do for an artistically-inclined youth…

¶ Tierce: Here’s a surprise: “Wanted” posters put out by the Environmental Protection Agency. But why a surprise?

¶ Sext: Ian Frazier’s lampoon of the Rosetta Stone ads that have been running in the backs of brainy magazines —

He was a hardworking farm boy. She was an Italian supermodel. He knew he would have just one chance to impress her.

 — is a brilliant scream. Why didn’t I write it?

¶ Nones: Michael Tomasky’s appraisal of President Obama’s week in Europe, in the Guardian, is warmly favorable — its party-pooping title notwithstanding. “With a rocket, Obama’s hope is shot back down to earth.”

¶ Vespers: A O Scott considers the formerly unmarketable short story: will short fiction benefit from the collapse of publishing as we know it?

¶ Compline:  Jim Holt recommends memorizing poetry. All I want is the Table of Contents to Essential Pleasures: A New Anthology of Poems to Read Aloud, selected by Robert Pinsky.

(more…)

With In Tearing Haste: Letters Between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor, I’ve got a new book to add to the Mitford shelf. (Deborah Devonshire is the youngest of the Mitford sisters.) Patrick Leigh Fermor was one of the last century’s great travel writers, more of an explorer really. I haven’t bothered to find out, just yet, how the two became friends, but then I didn’t much bother to think before buying this book — rather pricily, as it happens, as it’s the English (and, so far, sole) edition, flown in along with the sole.

It will probably take me a while to read Fermor’s half of the correspondence. My interest in exotic locales is less than nil. Aside from a few great cities and their environs, I couldn’t be less interested in travel. But their subject-matter doesn’t explain my keen interest in the dowager duchess’s letters, which carry good-humored disingenuousness to new heights. Here we find her grace (a self-avowed philistine incapable of reading anything more difficult than Beatrix Potter) trying to begin a new book:

The first sentence is very trying, you’ll admit. Famous Authors (that fraudulent thing in America which explains how to be one) says write ‘the’ on a bit of paper (well what else could it be on) & then put down some more words. I ask you. Then I thought ‘well,’ as all interviewees begin. No good. And ‘like,’ and ‘it came to pass.’ No good either. So I looked a few ghoul vols. no help. I think it will be ‘if,’ like Kipling, but the nub of the ensuing sentence is Dutch to nearly everyone…

It’s going to go like this: ‘If you ever live in the same place for a long time you become hefted to your hill like an old sheep.’

For all the teasing, though, there are occasional passages of very high luster, such as this friendly epitaph for JFK, to whom the duchess was related by marriage (his sister married her brother-in-law). She just returned from the president’s funeral when she wrote it:

Oh dear I do feel so sad about J Kennedy, but really the fantastic luck was knowing him at all, such an extraordinary person, so funny, so touching, clever, brave & sort of good, & such marvellous company.

Looking through a catalogue this afternoon, in search of storage solutions to my CD/DVD situation, I was amused to espy, on the lower shelf of a bedside table, in a sunny, colorful, and quite unstudious room, a harmonious stack of seven pistachio-jacketed Loeb Classics. Greek, in other words; not Latin (which would be raspberry). 

The picture is funny and not funny at the same time. It’s not funny because only one customer in umpteen thousands will appreciate how preposterous it would be (the funny part) to keep seven Loeb classics in an insouciant pile at one’s bedside. Two might be impressive — the Iliad, or the Odyssey. Even four would not be entirely grotesque (Pausanias?). But seven — seven has got to be Plutarch. The rule for readers of Plutarch in the Twenty-First Century is that perusing more than one volume must take place at a library table, not in bed. You can just hear the lucky spouse: “Okay, they’re green! They’re effing lovely! Now turn out the light!”

It’s possible that even the photo shoot’s designer wasn’t in on the joke. “I found this gorgeous color on a shelf at the Union League Club, when a client took me to lunch. They’re so old!” Wonderfully eliding the books’ arguable age with the indisputable antiquity of their contents. They’re so old, they didn’t even have books back then!

My favorite catalogue these days is Levenger’s collection of “Tools For Serious Readers.” Readers’ porn, I call it. I do not exaggerate! Levenger promises, literally, to make writing into an erotic experience. A page of fancy pens is headed: “Sublime designs to spark your creativity.” How about this:

Prepare to be more productive. Know what scholars and scribes have known for two thousand years when you experience for yourself how inclined work surfaces can help you read, write and work more productively…

Scholars and scribes! Two thousand years! We all know what “know” means, especially in two thousand year-old contexts! Even better:

“And that has made all the difference.” This line, the denouement of Robert Frost’s celebrated poem “The Road Not Taken,” is an appropriate introduction to the Morgan Note Card Traveler. Its three lengthwise pockets offer room to tuck inside your to-dos, cards, schedules, photos and brainstorming notes. At back is a display stand, which folds flat via hidden magnets…

All the hidden magnets in the world are not going to inspire another poem as pithy and beloved as Frost’s.

But that’s not the gravamen of my complaint. I don’t want my money back because my “L-Tech writing instrument” — although it did indeed allow me to “carve words with precision” — didn’t inspire me to pen the long-awaited sequel to The Great Gatsby. No! I did pen the sequel to The Great Gatsby, and it’s terrific; I’ve got it right here! But, you know what? I didn’t even realize that I was writing with the L-Tech. I was completely unconscious of the reams of “top quality pads for professionals” that I covered with Scribner-worthy prose! I might just as well have used foolscap!

What’s the point of bundling my work in a Circa Master Folio if I don’t look out the window when I’m working, much less hope that I’ll “expand my horizons”? Where’s that tingle of writing masterpieces with edgy equipment? Here I went to all this trouble to do justice to Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, and I never noticed that the wife had replaced my door-on-sawhorses arrangement with a Rumination Station!

I never knew!

In the middle of yesterday’s editing storm, a friend sent me the link to a heartbreaking story about abandoned infants who die in the back seats of cars. I was going to link to the story from last night’s Compline, but I couldn’t bring myself to end a week of links on that sorry note.

As my friend pointed out, the story has many rich tangents. But one stood out for me so strongly that I just about lost sight of the others. These ghastly car deaths became frequent only after federal regulations ordained the rear-facing, back-seat infant car seat. It’s pretty obvious why this design, however “safe” would fail the test of human cognition. And yet prosecutors — agents of the state that promulgated the mistake — have charged some unlucky parents with manslaughter and worse.

No one believes in the virtue of enlightened regulation more passionately than I do; but my enthusiasm is greatly tempered by the recognition that stupid regulations feed libertarian wet dreams. As someone who thought he was going the extra mile, back in 1972, by dumping his baby daughter in a reconfigured shopping basket, sans seat belts, I’d like to see the Chicken Littles driven out of safety regulation. If they don’t in fact do more harm than good, let’s hear about it; I suspect that they do. A child who dies in a collision in the front seat of a car dies a happier death — for the rest of us, which is what counts here — than the one who languishes in hundred-degree heat in the back seat of a car before succumbing to hyperthermia (even though it’s actually sixty degrees outside the car) because rear-facing car seats, however rational, turn out to be sublimely unreasonable.

The Week at Portico: Alexei Volodin played at the Museum last week, and, breaking a long private jinx, I wrote about it (nothing much). Even more liberating was tossing off a few paragraphs about Zoë Heller’s wry-Manhattan family portrait, The Believers. And, of course, the usual suspects, le minimum, as Albin puts it at the train station — the Book Review review, which you really ought to check out just for Alison Bechdel’s graphic, a first, and Sunshine Cleaning, which I saw with Kathleen, a rare event. (She liked it, too.)

¶ Matins: There must have been other stories making the same point, but this is the one about libraries reminds me of what I know of the Depression.

¶ Lauds: At least it’s free. Download John Cage’s celebrated composition, 4’33 at iTunes, and you won’t be charged. That’s because, well, you know….

¶ Prime: Here’s a truly benighted project: “Make Your Own Morandi.”

¶ Tierce: In an admirable move, Attorney General Eric Holder has dropped charges against former Alaska senator Ted Stevens — who would probably still be senator if it hadn’t been for his conviction of ethics violations. 

¶ Sext: Maira Kalman glosses Tocqueville; attends town meeting in Vermont, also elementary-school student council meeting; illustrates beautifully. (via  kottke.org)

¶ Nones: Just in time for the weekend, a palatial clip showing the meeting of two Anglophone heads of state in a remote corner of Mayfair (or is it Belgravia?).

¶ Vespers: Here’s a book that I would definitely read, if only I had time for such fun: Allegra Huston’s Love Child. Janet Maslin, mildly disapproving, makes it sound particularly delicious.

¶ Compline: Gmail turned 5 yesterday. Seems like just yesterday… and yet, how did we live without it? Just thinking about it is a sort of April Fool’s joke. Michael Calore sends an ecard from Wired. (Via Snarkmarket)

(more…)

¶ Lord Chesterfield doesn’t think much of naturalists.

It is characteristic of a man of parts and good judgment to know, and to give that degree of attention that each object deserves; whereas little minds mistake little objects for great ones, and lavish away upon the former that time and attention which only the latter deserve. To such mistakes we owe the numerous and frivolous tribe of insect-mongers, shell-mongers, and pursuers and driers of butterflies, etc. … Of this little sort of knowledge, which I have just hinted at, you will find at least as much as you need wish to know, in a splendid but pretty French book entitles Spectacle de la Nature, which will amuse you while you read it, and give you a sufficient notion of the various parts of nature….

Astronomy is different, though:

The vast and immense planetary system, the astonishing order and regularity of those innumerable world, will open a scewne to you, which not only deserves your attention as a matter of curiosity, or rather astonishment; but still more, as it will give you greater, and consequently juster ideas of that eternal and omnipotent Being, who contrived, made, and still preserves that universe, than all the contemplation of this, comparatively, very little orb, which we at present inhabit, could possibly give you.

So far as science goes, the foregoing marks Chesterfield as a man of the Seventeenth Century, not the Eighteenth.

¶ In Moby-Dick, more unintelligible cetacean anatomy. THIS IS NOT A NOVEL! I can feel a wave of Aneiosis coming on. Last season, I galloped through the final book of Virgil’s screed in one go, so mad was I to be done with it. I’m considerably farther from the end of Moby-Dick; in fact, I’m not that much past halfway. I no longer mind the reading so much; what bewilders me every time I pick up the book is its lofty reputation. It’s a piece of outsider art, is what it is.

¶ In Don Quixote, Sancho, “the scoundrel” (socarrón) shows that he’s learned a thing or two about his knight errant when he tries to solve the problem of producing a Dulcinea. He has never met this figment of Quixote’s imagination, but he has lied to the contrary, and now he’s in a pickle. Abracadabra: poor Don Quixote has been enchanted again, so that Dulcinea looks like a peasant girl, riding along on a donkey with two friends. Quixote puts up not the slightest resistance to the trick. Worse, Sancho can hardly “hide his laughter.”

¶ In Squillions, a cascade of fan letters from important people, all saying such wonderful things about In Which We Serve that you can’t believe that you’ve never seen it. I repeat: Barry Day ought to have titled his book, Letters Noël Coward Saved.

¶ Matins: What’s next, starving quarterhorses? “Boats Too Costly to Keep Are Littering Coastlines.” And here you were worried about fossil fuel emissions.

¶ Lauds: In June of next year, the Toronto summer festival, Luminato, will mount the premiere of Rufus Wainwright’s opera, Prima Donna. The work was to have been created at the Metropolitan Opera, but the composer rejected Met director Peter Gelb’s demand that Prima Donna be translated from French into English.

¶ Prime: Whatever you think of HRH’s fire station at Poundbury — and I don’t think that it’s so bad; in fact, I rather like those black drainpipes — you have to love the no-less-traditional irreverent fun that Justin McGuirk has talking about the “daft mess.”

¶ Tierce: Sounds like a good idea: Cash for Clunkers. You bring in your old car — old car — and get a credit toward the purchase of a new one — a smallish, greenish one. The move is unlikely to provide help for Cerberus, though — the private equity firm that bought Chrysler a few years ago.

¶ Sext: It’s a great day for checking out Despair, Inc.

¶ Nones: While the Times thinks that Velupillai Prabhakaran is indispensable to the Tamil insurgency, the BBC expects that the rebels would be able to carry on without him.

¶ Vespers: Not only are they both cartoonists whose work is regularly published in The New Yorker, but their styles are not remarkably dissimilar. Liza Donnelly and Michael Maslin have even collaborated on a book, called My Funny Valentine. It’s about them: they are married to one another.

¶ Compline: Kathleen called in the middle of the afternoon to report that the people in London who had to sign off on a deal this afternoon couldn’t — they were without power. Here’s why.

(more…)

Brad Watson’s story, “Visitation,” in this week’s New Yorker, caught my heart in its opening paragraph, which I’ve copied below. The story goes on from the opening, as indeed it must, with marvelous readability — near the end, a fellow motel guest who’s French, not Gypsy, recapitulates the entire story in a way that I can only term ‘neoclassical’ — but it’s the beginning that I’ll come back and back to.

Loomis had never believed that line about the quality of despair being that it was unaware of being despair. He’d been painfully aware of his own despair for most of his life. Most of his troubles had come from attempts to deny the essential hopelessness in his nature. To believe in the viability of nothing, finally, was socially unacceptable, and he had tried to adapt, to pass as a a believer, a hoper. He had taken prescription medicine, engaged in periods of vigorous, cleansing exercise, declared his satisfaction with any number of fatuous jobs and foolish relationships.

The real heartbreak begins in the very next sentence, with Loomis’s determination to marry and have a child; that child is the object of the title trip. It is all immensely sad, but so beautiful that one doesn’t think of how it might be fixed.

After a while, though, my sense of my own literary acumen burns off, and I’m left envying the writers who don’t believe in happiness.