So, it’s a boy. Megan and Ryan have narrowed the names down to a short list, but they’re “not sharing.” So we’re calling him “Irving.” The name was proposed by one of Ryan’s cousins, on Facebook, and swiftly rejected. But it’s too wonderfully improbable not to adopt pro tem, and, plus, what name could better suit the child of parents living in the Lower East Side?  On top of everything else, there won’t be any other Irvngs. We thought, my daughter’s mother and I, that in “Megan” we had found a name that would occur to no one else. If I’m just as wrong about “Irving,” well — how fantastic will that be.

It was not, at any rate, a very productive day. I was busy every minute, but with amazingly sparse results, at least when I was sitting at the computer. I had a cold supper all ready when the parents-to-be arrived, but I didn’t serve it right away, because I couldn’t sit down. I was simply too hot. Whatever my skin temperature was, the subcutaneous heat felt like 145º, and no amount of standing in front of fans would cool me off.

Megan handed round a sonogram — taken only this morning. (How wonderful it was to have them to dinner on the very day of their Finding Out.) It was a head shot. The tyke has a recognizable profile, complete with an itsy-bitsy nose; and he has a lot of rather Alienish teeth, still lodged in his gums. Ontogeny recapitulates cinematography.

I asked Megan, how was she sure? She replied that the technician made a point of asking her if she’d noticed “the little boy parts.” We take it that the technician knew what she was talking about, what with doing this every day. In any case, Megan had indeed noticed the little boy parts.

When I sigh, “A grandson!” — which I do quite often (even though it hasn’t been twenty-four hours since I heard the news) — it is all about me. I know that, and celebratory spirits are dampened accordingly. The responsible part of my cortex understands that the only important thing is that Ryan and Megan will have a healthy child who’s disposed to be happy. I am also of the opinion that they will be unusually thoughtful and energetic parents as well as loving ones.

But there is a lot of stuff about being a man that I have never come to terms with — I’ve worked around it. Maybe every man does, every thinking man, anyway. I’m speaking of everyday masculinity, which in everyday peacetime is almost entirely a matter of bluffing. From time to time, though, strange situations come up, and how we have dealt with them lingers. It lingers, and we are either proud or ashamed. We realize that the strange situations were defining, even if we didn’t know that at the time. Being men, we keep score, even the guys like me who don’t like games. And we wind up with questions like this: Do I “deserve” a grandson?

The answer to that is clearly “no.” Life, as I’ve been reading all over the place lately, owes us nothing. And the child’s gender doesn’t factor in the one thrill that I’m looking forward to the most: when Irving reaches out to pull my beard. If he’s healthy, he will pull my beard with a linebacker’s singlemindedness, genuinely hoping to pull the hair right off my face. Disappointment in this regard will only make him pull harder, and — this is the best part — he will smile at me in the most friendly way all through the torment. What fun he’ll be having!

No: I most certainly do not deserve a grandson, and here’s why: I’m plotting to have a false beard made, one that will tear off in his hands. Won’t he be surprised! And I will still have a beard! It’s time to endow an analyst fund.

¶ Matins: You laugh now: “The Inspector Clouseau of robot cops.” Wait till it comes back as Peter Weller.

¶ Lauds: A new blog to follow: The Footnotes of Mad Men. (via kottke.org)

¶ Prime: Are there really any such thing as “banking stars,” worth being hired away for that competitive edge? Jeffrey Pfeffer thinks not.

¶ Tierce: The irresistible Mr Wrong wonders why no one wants to shoot the breeze at Starbuck’s.

¶ Sext: Almost as good as “Rollo Tommasi”: When people ask where you’re vacationing next summer, just tell them, “Buss Island.” Tell ’em it’s the undiscovered Nantucket.

¶ Nones: North Korea will send a delegation to the funeral of former South Korean president Kim Dae-jung.

¶ Vespers: Alain de Botton will be writing from Heathhrow Airport.

¶ Compline: That really was a storm on Tuesday night! More than a hundred trees were felled in Central Park alone. (Thanks, Tom!) (more…)

For days, I’ve been stewing over how long it has been since my last visit to the storage unit, on 62nd Street. Something must be done! That’s really how I put it to myself — which explains why nothing happens. “Something must be done!” means just about nothing. “Go to the storage unit this week” is all too clear. I was avoiding clarity.

On Friday, however, I’m scheduled, as I mentioned the other day, to have a Remicade infusion. That rules out going to the movies, at least during the day. Nothing would be over in time. So I’d have to go sooner. Yesterday, surveying my worksheets — yes! it has come to that! worksheets! — I figured that I could spare the time for a movie this morning, and, what d’you know, but a movie that I’ve been wanting to see, In the Loop, is showing right next door to the storage unit. How dandy! I’d see the movie, have lunch at a nearby pub, and then spend an hour or two in storage — boxing books. The current plan is to pack books in boxes and then have Housing Works come pick them up. I’m told that they’ll do that. (We’ll see.)

We stayed up very late last night, and got up correspondingly late this morning. Kathleen got up very late. If I’d left when she did, in fact, I’d have been just a few minutes early for In the Loop. But I wasn’t feeling very well; there were gastro-intestinal issues (phantom, as it turned out), plus the malaise that follows a late night of drinking wine until Kathleen goes to bed. Did I say that Kathleen was obsessing over the knitting of bootees? So often, that’s how late nights happen. I saw Kathleen off to work, and went to the computer, where I sat most discontentedly. “I’ll go tomorrow,” I told myself. But this proved to be unacceptable. A part of me — the largely unfamiliar Sicilian part — had been assured that we’d be going to the storage unit today. The Sicilian part of me is not prone to violence, but it is very ascetic. It is most unhappy when suffering is on the menu, but only on the menu. The Sicilian part of me also wants to get things over with.

So I was running late when I got to the movies. Not late-late; if all had gone well, I’d have missed a couple of previews, no more. But all was not going well. The box office couldn’t take credit cards; it was a problem with the connection. I never pay cash for the movies (or for anything that will take plastic), but I’d have made an exception this morning if I hadn’t been quite late — because it took forever for the customer at the head of the line to decide how she wanted to handle the outage. Would she pay cash? Would she come back later? When I asked and found out that I’d have to pay cash at the refreshment counter, too, I turned on my heels and went next door to storage.

The reason for the “Something must be done!” mentality is that we are paying a fortune — in many parts of the United States, it would cover a nice one-bedroom apartment — for vastly more storage space than we need. We could have what’s left just packed up and moved to another, smaller storage unit uptown (in a facility operated by the same outfit). But I’m determined to shed the books that make up a large percentage of current contents. When the books are gone, we’ll have a better idea of how much storage space we really need. Or so I rationalize.

Having surveyed the dump, I went back downstairs and bought six “large” packing boxes. Even before I paid for them, I knew that they were too big for books; they’d be impossibly heavy if packed full. As indeed they were. On my way back to the elevator, I realized that I didn’t have any strapping tape. I decided not to buy any at this time. I would unfold a couple of boxes and fill them and see how it went. This was not the dumb idea that it may seem to be. The experience of putting books in a box, even knowing that they’d all have to be packed in some other box, was nothing short of inspiring. I can’t wait to go back and buy six “small” packing boxes. I’ve already got the tape; I picked  it up at Gristede’s when I was shopping for dinner.

Having filled two large boxes, I decided to quit. I stuffed some junk in a tote — a bunch of trays, as it happened — and went to the pub. Then I went home. The Sicilian part of me was still not satisfied. What about the movies? Now, for most people, going to the movies is fun. And it is for me, too! But it is also an assignment. If I’m supposed to see a movie on Friday, but know in advance that I won’t be able to see a movie on Friday, the Sicilian part of me takes a very dim and jaundiced view of proposals that involve going to the movies on the weekend. The Sicilian part of me knows that going to the movies on the weekend is almost certainly not going to happen. This is because I myself detest seeing movies on the weekend, when the theatres are relative full. I like empty theatres.

So I looked at what was showing in the neighborhood. The good news is that thirteen different movies are showing within two blocks of my house. The bad news is that more than half of them are always out of the question. Also bad news, on a day like today: I have usually seen the aceeptable movies already. Pretty quickly, this afternoon’s choices came down to two: The Hurt Locker, which I’d like to have seen (if you know what I mean), and The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard, which (I checked) has a Metacritic rating of 41. Did I really want to see Jeremy Piven play a slobulesque hustler? No. But it was a less-sharp stick in the eye. A less-sharp stick in the Sicilian-part-of-me’s hand.

When I crossed 86th Street on my way home, I noticed that the sun was hot. It was as though a broiler-oven had been opened behind me, and waves of heat were pouring out. This heat thing has got to come to an end soon. I’m bearing up better than I’ve done in the past, but it’s like life in wartime: I’m doing without a lot of stuff “for the duration.” Maybe, though, the heat is making the Sicilian part of me feel more at home. How on earth else explain my trip to a purgatorial storage unit on a blazing day?

¶ Matins: (Note: this item is not about classical music.) In her WaPo piece about classical-music CDs, Anne Midgette labors under the impression that serious music recordings require the brokerage of a healthy “industry.” We agree with Henry Fogel: leaving industry behind is what’s healthy. (via Arts Journal)

¶ Lauds: Why is Britain’s National Trust spat taking us back to the 1640s? Surely not just the coincidence of princes called “Charles”?

¶ Prime: Robert Cringely thinks out loud about the ethics of technology. He used to think that Google’s motto was silly, but not anymore.

¶ Tierce: Is it possible? The Marshall Trial’s case for the prosecution was slated to end yesterday— two days into the trial’s 17th week. On Friday, the jury and the court will take a two-week vacation.

¶ Sext: At The Onion: “Film Adaptation Of ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ Ends Where Most People Stop Reading Book.” And where is that? 

The 83-minute film, which is based on the first 142 or so pages of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s acclaimed work, has already garnered attention for its stunning climax, in which the end credits suddenly appear midway through Katerina’s tearful speech about an unpaid debt.

(via The Morning News)

¶ Nones: China is upset with Australia, about Uighur leader Rebiya Kadeer’s visit. When will China learn that foreign public opinion can be controlled no better by overt interference than by armed occupation?

¶ Vespers: Amazing news! Six million subscribers take Reader’s Digest. Still! So don’t over-interpret news of the publication’s bankruptcy filing.

¶ Compline: Natalie Angier writes lucidly about a murky subject: stress. Bottom line: it’s up to you to break out of the stress feedback loop.

(more…)

We had a super storm this evening. It was super for us because we were home — high and dry. I did think about the people who were just getting out of the theatre. The rain was coming down in curtains, like a blizzard, only much noisier — and that without factoring in the operatic thunder and lightning, for which, trust me, no expense was spared. Gigantic lighting bolts were thrust into Astoria as though Bette Davis were stubbing out cigarettes in a fit of pique. It suited my mood down to the ground.

It suited my mood down to the ground because I’d just found out the most incredible thing. I’ll be writing more about this incredible thing in a Portico page that I’ll link to next Monday, but for the moment it’s enough to say earlier in the evening, over dinner, before the storm, I was wondering what in hell I would write about this week’s New Yorker story. This week’s New Yorker story, “Max at Sea,” by Dave Eggers, turns out to be an extract from the novelization of Mr Eggers’s script, with Spike Jonze, of a film adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s Where The Wild Things Are. But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks, didn’t know that when I read the story. I didn’t find out until after dinner.

I was plenty pissed, I don’t mind saying. But that’s all I’m going to say for the time being.

***

We had one of our New Evenings, and it was a great success. As Kathleen left for work this morning (for the printer, actually), she said that she’d be home early, and she asked for a chicken salad. I don’t think that she really wanted a chicken salad, but that’s what does come to mind in a pinch if you have been brought up as Kathleen was. The idea of ordering dinner like a great lady, at the beginning of the day, does not come naturally to my wife. After nearly thirty years of marriage to the likes of me, she still has her Second Mrs de Winter moments.

In the event, Kathleen did make it home very early, and we did have a chicken salad. We had yet another chicken salad that I invented, this time to use up what was on hand, so that I wouldn’t have to go out to buy anything. Here’s how I did it:

I combined about a half cup of mayonnaise with a dash of curry powder, the juice of half a lemon, a quarter teaspoon (or less) of moutarde de Meaux, salt, and the top half of an avocado. Despite the ghastly summer weather that we’ve been having, the avocado was not quite ripe, so I had to process it into the dressing.

To this I added a left-over roast chicken breast — just the one. Cubed, as they say. Also the cubed other half of the avocado. About two dozen green grapes, halved. And a small handful of toasted walnuts.

This yielded just enough for two — such a relief. Frugality is my motto these days. It means making the most of everything, and that, in turn, means “no leftovers,” because Kathleen and I never eat leftovers. The leftover roast chicken breast doesn’t count, because it’s not really a leftover; we wouldn’t eat it at all, except in a salad.

***

Also over dinner, we talked about Mozart’s strep throat,* which soon enough led to (yet) another hearty denunciation of Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus. I used to wish that Mozart would come back to life just to see how neat it is to listen to all his music on the phonograph/cassette player/8 track/CD/Nano. But now I wish that he would write THE opera about being a misunderstood artist. Instead of “Salieri kills Mozart,” we could have “Mozart kills Pushkin/Rimsky/Shaffer.”

* It is taking me a while to adjust to the new Greg Kinnear portrait of Mozart, but I’m working on it. Mozart on CNN, though — it’s weak of me, I know, but I think it’s cool.

¶ Matins: Jonah Lehrer proposes a molecular theory of curiosity: don’t worry, it’s easily grasped.

¶ Lauds: David Denby’s unfavorable review of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds makes sense to us — which confirms our suspicion that it is an old-man view of things.

¶ Prime: Felix Salmon reads that crazy story about the guy with the $25,000 certified check in his briefcase, and contemplates a depressing conclusion.

¶ Tierce: Why rock stars ought to die young: “eccentric-looking old man” spooks renters, turns out to be Bob Dylan. (via The Morning News)

¶ Sext: A “Good Food Manifesto for America”, from former basketball pro Will Allen. (via How to Cook Like Your Grandmother)

¶ Nones: Turkey struck an interesting agreement with Iraq last week: more water (for Iraq) in exchange for tougher crackdowns on PKK rebels active near the Turkish border. (via Good)

¶ Vespers: Not so hypothetical: what if you could teach only one novel in a literature class that would probably constitute your students’ only contact with great fiction? A reader asks the editors of The Millions.

¶ Compline: Two former policemen argue for legalizing narcotics. (via reddit)

(more…)

On Friday, something remarkable happened: I was never alone. Extraordinary, really. I am usually alone for most of the day, and always for at least part of it. But one thing led to another. Actually, every time somebody left, somebody else showed up.

On Saturday, instead of succumbing to the vapors, I tackled the housekeeping with unusual thoroughness. Aside from a short stack of DVDs, a tall stack of CDs, and the materials that one fine day will be mounted in our wedding scrapbook (just in time for our thirtieth anniversary?), everything lying about the apartment in the morning had found its place by dark.

On Sunday, I had to work. Well, I hadn’t been able to get anything done on Friday! I didn’t mind working yesterday, though. I didn’t feel under pressure to get things done, although I don’t know why that should be.

This Friday, I’ll have my quarterly Remicade infusion. For the first time in ages, I feel that I need it. It may be that my immune system has had nothing to do with the fact that I’ve felt run down for about a week — and, although I’ve felt run down, I haven’t felt the small but sapping aches and pains that characterized life before Remicade. Not yet. And I wasn’t too run down to have a big day on Friday (big for me, anyway) and an industrious one on Saturday. It’s possible that I’ve just been working hard. But I’m disappointed that I won’t be progressing from four infusions per year to three anytime soon. I have no objection to the infusions themselves; ordinarily, I feel no different leaving the hospital than I did walking in. But the infusions are very expensive, and I can’t expect that insurance will always be there to pick up the tab. 

Another dispiriting factor has been the pile of novels that confronts me. I’m not really taken by any of the books in it; I’m afraid that I bought rather promiscuously in the spring. I wanted to be in the swim. Instead: imagine whitewater rafting, but without the water. The novels in my pile have been as difficult to like as it is hard to imagine waterless whitewater.  

I have come to think somewhat better of Colson Whitehead’s Sag Harbor, though. I really disliked the first two chapters, and when the subject of the New Coke fiasco came up — the book is set in 1985 — I thought about throwing the book across the room. Now that I’ve almost finished it, I think instead than the author has undertaken this project at least 15 years too soon. Mr Whitehead writes very well — a bit too well at times, if you know what I mean — and he has a sure grip on the agonies of adolescence. But he doesn’t yet know how to make that most horrible stretch of life interesting. (Maybe nobody does.) It’s rather like what Kathleen said of the Francis Bacon show at the Museum — twice as awful up close.

I myself, by the way, find the Bacon twice as interesting, and surprisingly beautiful. But I know better than to venture a discussion of the matter with Kathleen. At least I got her to see it.

Tomorrow, I will be alone all day. What’s extraordinary is that I don’t know anymore how important it is, or even if it is important, to be alone. That is, I don’t have to be alone in order to work. A deeper-thrusting change is hard to imagine. 

New at Portico:  This week’s book, Walter Kirn’s Lost in the Meritocracy, probably ought not to be as entertaining as it is. On the last page, the author makes a lamentably post-graduate discovery: reading Twain and Dickens for pleasure. What he learned at Princeton can only be called bullshit. The book is horrifying evidence that we in America suffered a Cultural Revolution of our own.

On Friday, I saw Funny People, and I loved it. But it’s extremely unusual nature is somewhat concealed by its romper-room cast. Will this be the picture that makes audiences tell Judd Apatow that they preferred his “earlier, funnier” movies?

In addition to going to the movies every Friday morning (more or less), we’re going to take a good look at DVDs in our home library, also on a weekly basis. It just so happens that we begin with Allen Coulter’s Hollywoodland, a movie that we’ve come to like very much since it came out three years ago.

As for the Book Review review, we can’t remember an issue stuffed so full of cranky, unhelpful reviews of new fiction.

At the sound of the Mad Men theme — one of the best ever — I was surprised by an uncomfortable feeling: Back to school. Kathleen and I would be spending the next few months with Don and Betty; Peggy, Pete, and Joan; and the rest of the old gang at Sterling Cooper. If the first two seasons were anything to go by, we’d spend at least half the week mulling over each Sunday’s episode, which, at least for the first month or so, we’d watch twice, first at ten and then at eleven, for the “reprise.”

In the paper today, Frank Rich ventured to suggest that this may be the year that audiences, hitherto modest, catch up with the critics. Let’s hope so! And yet it would be hard to imagine a less inviting season opener than this evening’s episode. Those Brits — how were new audiences supposed to care about “Moneypenny”? And the whole “Head of Accounts” routine.

True, there was some really good stuff involving Don and Sal. On a trip to Baltimore, to assure the London Fog boss (and his son) that the company is still very much on Sterling Cooper’s “mind,” despite the departure of a head of accounts (whom we’d never seen before, had we?), a stewardess flirts her way into Don’s firing range. You do have to wonder how he manages to summon any interest in such chickadees, because even at the outset he looks as though he is haunted by Shakespeare’s Sonnet CXXIX —

Past reason hunted, and no sooner had,
Past reason hated as a swallowed bait
On purpose laid to make the taker mad;
Mad in pursuit, and in possession so.

Happily, the camera does not linger on Don’s dalliance with Sherry the Stewardess. It moves to another room in the hotel, to which Sal has summoned a bellboy to fix his air conditioner. Sal is having a number of other moving parts serviced when the firebell sounds an alarm. You feel about this exactly the way Sal does. Dashing down the fire escape — what kind of hotel is this, anyway? — Don chances to peer into Sal’s room. What he sees is safe for work, but only technically.

The climax of this episode-within-the-episode occurs on the flight back to New York. Sal looks as though he’s tormented by (a) constipation and (b) the knowledge that his colon has been rammed full of explosives. Don leans into him and asks him for an honest answer. Oh, Jesus! Don proceeds to outline a new London Fog campaign. He describes a commuter in a subway car who is looking at a girl in a raincoat. We see the girl from behind, but we can tell that she is naked beneath the raincoat: the commuter is being flashed. Don leans in a little closer. “Limit Your Exposure.” Three little words; a word to the wise. It’s a small masterpiece of indirect discourse. Shakespeare himself might have signed up to take the course where they taught that one.

Next time, though, we need more Peggy. Lots more Peggy. After all, she’s going to take over eventually, isn’t she?

Press & Discuss: Heath Robinson or Rube Goldberg?

¶ Matins: Why the arrangement that Niall Ferguson and others calls “Chimerica” can’t go on indefinitely: “Forget about a Shanghai stock bubble. The whole Chinese economy’s getting ready to burst.”

¶ Lauds: Ben Davis sheds light on the “Museum Bubble,” which as any follower of ArtsJournal knows, has popped. (via The Morning News)

¶ Prime: The news about the Sony Reader makes us glad that we didn’t get the Kindle after all.

¶ Tierce: Roman Hans explains the real-ity of health care reform.

¶ Sext: Name a fruit, any fruit. You’ll probably be wrong. And you probably won’t think of peas. (via kottke.org)

¶ Nones: The burkini — banned in bikiniland.

¶ Vespers: Julia Keller defends her growing admiration for graphic fiction; elsewhere in the Chicago Tribune, David Ulin reviews Asterios Polyp — as does C Max Magee at The Millions : “Mope Free.”

¶ Compline: For safer streets, look at Dutch roads. “Going naked” means that drivers have to think when driving through Dutch towns.

¶ Bon weekend à tous!

(more…)

Here I am at 23 months. According to the legend, I’m standing in “Mother’s Library,” which, since my mother wrote it, would be my grandmother’s library. Where was that? And what was Nana Lilly doing with a library? This must have been Grampa’s Sutton Place flat, about which more anon. As you can see, I’m the compleat sophisticate, accoutered with cardie and corduroys, surrounded by books, and reaching, with unsuccessful surreptitiousness, for the maraschino cherry at the bottom of the glass. It would appear that a number of charmed adults have been ruffling my hair.

At least there isn’t too much hair — a Seventies problem. Here, it is still 1949. Truman is president. Hattie Carnegie lives at the Cooper-Hewitt. This is the first picture of me as I am today. It’s done.

Here is an earlier picture — same apartment — from my life in the American Raj. Is that kitchen neat as a pin, or what? The curtains alone! I clearly learned nothing from my early environments.

¶ Matins: Great news! Our trade deficit widened, as we imported yet more junk in June! That must mean that our economy is doing better, right?

¶ Lauds: A new artists’ colony — this one just for composers — will start up in Westchester next month. (via Arts Journal)

¶ Prime: The shipping news: Los Angeles/Long Beach would rank as the world’s fifth busiest container port, if they were tabulated together.

¶ Tierce: The case that has everything keeps on giving. Subway stabbings! (Almost.)

¶ Sext: Can powdered wigs be far behind? The spoofsters at Being Tyler Brûlé staff the eponymous (amd still fictional) airline.

¶ Nones: Hugo Chávez declares that golf is not a sport; officials move to close courses.

¶ Vespers: Now that everybody seems to be reading The Age of Wonder, Richard Holmes’s book about a handful of scientists working between the heydays of Enlightenment and Romanticism, we are ever more mindful that science, however bound to numbers (rightly so!), is practiced by messy human minds.

¶ Compline: Jonah Lehrer on the self: a ghost that runs the machine. “The self feels like a singular thing – I am me – and yet it comes from no single brain area…”

(more…)

Taking stock of old photograph albums this evening, just to know what’s what, so as to begin thinking about what to do with what, I had occasion to look at a lot of very old pictures of me, of Kathleen, of our families, and even of people who I only heard about as a child. Aunt Lala, for instance. She was a connection of my maternal grandfather’s family in St Paul, but I’m not sure that she was actually related to anyone. Imagine being called “Lala”! And the way my mother would say her name told me that, well, it meant pretty much what you’d think it would today.

Kitty Lilly at ten, looking gorgeous already (what a colleen she was!) in a swimsuit, posed demurely but not primly on a dock at White Bear Lake. Kitty babysat for us while she attended Manhattanville College, in the late Fifties. I could swear that she took us to see Vertigo and Teahouse of the August Moon — fascinatingly inappropriate movie choices. She probably didn’t; but she was so cool that it’s no wonder that I pin the adventures on her. One of my favorite memories is of her correcting me in the kitchen during one of my parents parties. She was all dressed up, while I was malingering in my pyjamas and bathrobe — ” malingering” being a fine word, I think, for a child’s opportunistically contriving to stay up way past bed time. Always ready to tell anyone who asked what it was that I wanted — for Christmas, for my birthday, or just in general — I angled passionately for my latest heart’s desire, a set of “resonance chessmen.” Eventually, Kitty figured out the spoonerism and clued me in. The funniest part is that, at least as I remember them, the Renaissance chessmen were in fact quite lugubriously gothic, elongated like the kings at Chartres. I never got the chessmen, which is a great relief to my conscience, as I never played chess with enough interest to deserve a special set of any kind. After Manhattanville, Kitty went back to Lincoln, married, and had a family. I exchange Christmas cards with her widower, whom I may have met once, a long time ago. I haven’t met either of Kitty’s daughters.

Then there’s an album that will be very easy to knock down into digital shape. It’s a collection of smallish Polaroids of a dinner party for 65 people that my parents gave, in the spring of 1972, to introduce my first wife (then my fiancée) and her mother to their friends. Tables for eight or ten were strewn about the house; I dined at the one in my old bedroom. Well, “old” bedroom. I’d moved out of it about a year earlier, and into it only three years before that. There was a Raj aspect to our immense Tanglewood home: my father would not have been able to afford anything like such square footage in the Westchester that we’d left behind in 1968. At the party, you won’t be surprised to learn, our table was the most riotous. One of the most high-spirited company wives was easily goaded by a rather interesting member of the “St Michael’s Mafia” into smoking a great big cigar, and how we all ended up with our clothes on, I’ll never know.

On my honeymoon with Kathleen, nine years later, we went up to New Hampshire and stayed at a place called the Woodbound Inn. Never has there been such a peak week for sugar-maple reds; the snapshots that I took look hand-colored. Kathleen and I spent a lot of time with my aunt and uncle, who were nearby, and my cousin Jane, who still lived at home at the time. Looking at the picture of John, Kathleen, Ann and Jane tonight, I realized that my late uncle was a year younger than I am now, and my aunt quite a bit younger — probably not even Kathleen’s age.

But the most remarkable photograph that I saw today was posted by my daughter at Facebook, and that’s another story!  

 

 

¶ Matins: First the bad news, then the worse: Bob Herbert on the ongoing evaporation of good jobs, and Adam Cohen on a Supreme Court challenge to the ban on direct corporate political contributions.

¶ Lauds: The Chicago Tribune‘s Blair Kamin asks, “Can the public love public art to death?” Perhaps “love” is not the word, but, yes. Ben van Berkel’s temporary Burnham Plan Pavilion in Millennium Park will close for four days of repairs. (via  Arts Journal)

¶ Prime: Two scapegraces — one of whom ended the other’s Wall Street career — don wise-old-men hats, and discuss “Who Killed Wall Street?”

¶ Tierce: Muscato muses rather eloquently on differences in ageing, then (1956) and now. “The New Math” considers two 51 year-old women…

¶ Sext: Almost as cool as the High Line, plus they’re in Brooklyn: the alleys of Crown Heights, at Scouting NYC.

¶ Nones: What to do about Burma? Now that Aung San Suu Kyi has been senteced to more house arrest, in a bogus move to keep her off the next year’s ballot, sovereign critics of the ruling junta can choose from three options: pouting ineffectively, imposing sanctions of doubtful impact, or “doing something,” whatever that means. In other words, bupkis.

¶ Vespers: We haven’t read Richard Russo, but John Williams’s review of the latest novel, That Old Cape Magic, at The Second Pass, might change that.

¶ Compline: A young teacher at a charter school quits, claiming, basically, that she was starved for respect. Her principal replies, observing that “teaching is never about the teacher.” True — but would anyone be having this conversation if teaching were properly compensated? (via Brainiac) (more…)

Let’s just never mind why. The oven smoked something awful tonight. I knew that it was going to, but I had to run a few pieces of ham under the broiler, for a total of ten minutes. In that short time, the air in the kitchen became toxic. It would have been less so if I hadn’t closed the swinging door, but on a hot night I didn’t want to open the balcony door. And I certainly didn’t want to advertise my smoke-detectorlessness to my neighbors, by opening the front door, which is what Kathleen wanted to do. When we sat down to dinner — a very tasty dinner, as it happened — I weakened and let in the hot air from outside.

Why am I telling you this? Because I want you to know that even on days when I don’t cross a street, life can be very exciting here. And, even though the smoke has cleared, the air in the kitchen is still pretty acrid.

Notwithstanding all of that, as I say, we had a very nice dinner, and I want to thank Kathleen’s cousin-by-marriage, Kurt Holm, for the recipe. Kurt and a friend of his have started up a very smart site — I suppose it’s a blog, essentially — that offers a dandy idea for dinner every weekday. The idea, I believe, is that you check out the site while you’re at work, and, if you like what’s on offer that day, you print out the entry, which includes a shopping list, a pantry list — things that you’ve probably got on hand — and a list of necessary kitchen equipment, as well as step-by-step instructions. It couldn’t be more lucid. This was the second time that we tried a recipe.

The site is called notakeout, and today’s dish is called “Green Beans, Walnuts and Lemon with Grilled Ham.”

To tell you the truth, I have never had anything quite like it — and yet there’s nothing strange about the food in front of you. Atop slices of ham that have been glazed with melted apricot preserves and then grilled, you spoon a light salad of steamed beans tossed in butter and lemon, together with a handful of toasted chopped walnuts. Kathleen, who would eat cardboard if you squeezed lemon juice on it, was in heaven, and ate every bite. I ate every bite, too. I made a few very slight and very idiosyncratic mental adjustments to the recipe, because there will be a next time.

After dinner, I retired to the blue room and did a lot of tedious updating work on the “Home Theatre” branch at Portico. (The menu has no permalink, so I’ll send you to the page with the sexy snaps — can you believe Claudette Colbert’s dress? If she were buck naked, you wouldn’t stare as hard.) Over the years — and I mean all of them, since 2000, when I launched Portico, that I’ve spent online — I’ve occasionally written up movies in my DVD  collection. This is distinct from the “Friday movies,” reports of movies that I’ve just seen in the theatre.

Why would I write about a film twice? The simplest answer is to invite you to compare the review that I gave to Hollywoodland when I saw it in the theatre, nearly three years ago — in those days, I kept the reviews at The Daily Blague, not at Portico — and the Home Theatre entry that I wrote today, after watching the DVD three times over a recent ten-day period. Studio executives may be less than thrilled to hear it, but most of the best movies get better over time.

I wasn’t writing this evening, certainly. I was updating HTML files and choosing images for the pages that I’d written before Corel WinDVD made it easy to capture stills. (Or that I hadn’t bothered to garnish with images.)

In any case, got the Home Theatre branch into shape because I plan to add a new page to it every week. What’s next? Either Hitchcock or Fred Astaire — but don’t hold me to it.

¶ Matins: What’s so productive about “Gross Domestic Product,” asks historian Eric Zencey? A re-think of GDP for a greener world.

¶ Lauds: A new business plan for classical musicians: don’t seek shelter in a large and venerable organization. Andrew Druckenbrod explains musical entrepreneurship.

¶ Prime: The economics of farmers’ markets could use a design boost. Alissa Walker reports at GOOD.

¶ Tierce: Kate McLaughlin, 19, heads off to Northwestern — for law school. somewhat more remarkably, she graduated from the University of California at San Diego two years ago. What do you think about this kind of precocity?

¶ Sext: Sebastian Münster’s map of Europe, upside-down, at Strange Maps.

¶ Nones: In Sunday’s Times, a long overdue explanation of the Honduran political divide.

¶ Vespers: Jenni Diski reflects on the art of the late Stanley Middleton, a Booker Prize winner whom we hadn’t heard of.

¶ Compline: Andrew Sullivan, in his tenth year of Daily-Beast-ing, resumes the practice of taking August off.

(more…)

Boy, did I overdo it. What I thought would be a Sunday dinner of several courses was instead two Sunday dinners, one served right on top of the other.

As usual, I prepped a chicken for roasting, on Saturday. I spatchcocked it and tucked wads of tarragon butter beneath the skin on the breast. Then I wrapped up the bird in foil and stuck it in the icebox. Everything was set for a normal Sunday dinner. Kathleen and I would eat the legs, and I’d cut up the white meat for salads.

But I had a slightly belated birthday present to give to Fossil Darling, whose principal virtue is his fixed relative antiquity. That is, he is permanently eighteen months  older than I am (all right, seventeen). Forever. Unalterably. When were were thrown together at boarding school, eighteen months — or even seventeen — was a significant percentage of my age, more than 10%! So I persist in thinking of Fossil as considerably older. He used to be considerably more mature, but I let that pass. The thing is, I wanted the box out of my house. To make sure that he came and took it away, I offered him dinner. He accepted.

Then I went to the store. My appetite was running to an unseasonable mushroom dish, preferably involving ravioli. This would be the “starch” course. Then I would serve the roast chicken, quartered nicely, and complete each plate with half of a stewed heirloom tomato. Lemon tart to finish. Agata & Valentina was selling packets of good-looking chanterelles, so I bought one and supplemented it with a packet of buttons. I meant to buy a tub of veal stock, but I forgot to, so I stopped in at Gristede’s on the way home and bought a quart of College Inn “sirloin” beef broth — a product that I hadn’t seen before.

I chopped the mushrooms and browned them in batches (having learned this trick, not even knowing that it was one, from Julie & Julia). When the mushrooms were cooked, and had left a nice deposit on the bottom of the sauté pan, I softened a couple of sliced shallots in butter and then deglazed the pan with vermouth. So much for preparation. I returned the mushrooms to the pan and added a cup of the broth. I kept adding more broth as it simmered down, until the box was empty. Then I added a small quantity of cream. Oh! and fresh sage leaves, which I did not cut up, thinking that, like dill, they would hold up through the cooking process well enough to be easily removed when the sauce was finished. (Wrong — but not fatal.)

Only later, after everyone had pushed the chicken disconsolately about the plates, did I realize that the ravioli course contained the business end of a quart of sirloin steak essence. My little ravioli primo would have made a fine dinner by itself, with maybe a little salad afterwards and then perhaps some cheese — and then the tart. Far more interesting than the sequel of roast chicken. Although it was delicious, it competed with the sirloin, and lost. The mushroom-ravioli sauce deep, rich, and complex. It made the chicken routine and — just plain heavy. 

Another thing that didn’t strike me until later was that it had been a long time since there had been four people dining at the table. The occasion might have been a first for 2009. I’m not saying that I was out of practice. If anything, the time lapse intensified my sense of having cooked far too much food. It wouldn’t have happened if I’d started out, mentally, with the ravioli. I’d never have thought of throwing in a chicken dish as well. But I began with the chicken, and throwing in a pasta dish seemed absolutely normal.

Absolutely normal because I wasn’t really thinking.

 New at Portico:  Well over a year ago, I read one of the greatest novels that I have ever encountered, Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland. I was hugely impressed, but I was also in love — with the result that my response was short-circuited. I might have managed to squeak out a word or two if I hadn’t also been convinced that most of the reviews, even when they were favorable (and most of them were), were wildly off.

I read the novel again at Thanksgiving, and then again after Christmas. I took lots of notes, but my paralysing intimidation only increased. The paperback edition came out; President Obama was said to be reading it; sales spiked. Good for Joseph O’Neill! But what about me? Determined to say something at Portico, iI ferreted through my notes bowl and found a fragment that seemed publishable. It’s more a first word on the novel than a last word, but it’s up, and I’m not unhappy with it. I argue that Netherland is a novel about wistfulness, and I argue also that wistfulness is the polar opposite of nostalgia. These are ideas that I contracted from reading Netherland several times.

The week before last, I didn’t get round to writing up the New Yorker story, and this left me with two jobs. I took care of both of them, but not without a lot of revision. The page on Joshua Ferris’s “The Valetudinarian” had to be rewritten from scratch, and “War Dances,” by Sherman Alexie, threatened to be alien corn.

This week’s movie was, of course, Julie and Julia. The movie would probably have been heaven anyway, but more like paradise lost, because I’d have had to explain to Kathleen later. Under normal Friday-movie circumstances, that is. But Kathleen was determined to see the movie with me, so it was just plain paradise.

Last and least: this week’s Book Review review.