First, a word about the crap in front of the breakfront. The cute boxes with the ribbons contain a number of smaller pieces of silver that probably ought to be given away. (Wouldn’t you like some?) Beneath the skirted footstool lies the household supply of soft drinks (Kathleen does not believe in ice). On top of the boxes, a serving dish sits beneath a cunning screened dome, designed to keep insects away from outdoor treats. (I don’t need it at all, but I can’t get rid of it. Perhaps this photograph will shame me into taking action.)

Second, a word about the crap in the breakfront. You can’t really see it, but I want you to know that it’s all on the way out — either to the hutch on the balcony or to HousingWorks.

Third, a word about the pile of crap to the left of the breakfront: history in the making — if you know what I mean by “history.”

***

Aside from half an hour at the beginning of the day and another half hour at the end, I spent all of Friday with Quatorze. We were to meet at the Orpheum in time for the ten o’clock showing of The Informant!, but when I crossed Second Avenue, there he was, early as usual, killing time by walking an extra block that he would only have to backtrack. I don’t know who is going to win this particular war. Will Quatorze shame me into being as ahead-of-time as he is? I used to feel ashamed, and rightly so, because I used to be late. But now I am punctual and Quatorze is early. I’d much rather hang out at home until the last minute than spend extra time at the Orpheum, wondering if the projectionist will ever get round to starting the feature. As long as I’m not late, I’m not keeping anybody waiting — technically. But I feel ashamed of being the second person of two to show up.

After the movie, we had lunch next door, at Burger Heaven. This wasn’t to be one of our leisurely lunches, because we had a job to do. Quatorze wanted to know if the top of the breakfront/secretary desk could be detached from the bottom. We would discover that it can, thanks to Quatorze’s knowledge of furniture construction, nimbleness with tools, and heroic determination.  We would detach the upper, glass-fronted part of the breakfront from the lower part. Then Quatorze would convince me that the best place for the upper part, right now, is right where it was. We settled it on the dowels that projected from the lower part. The screws went into a ziploc bag.

We learned that the bottom has no top. When you take the upper part of the breakfront away, you see a lot of struts and braces, and some very fresh-looking mahogany, but no surface — and, thanks to those dowels, no easy way to improvise one. The plan is to have a top made — Quatorze recurs to the manmade composite known as “quartz” — and to put the glass-fronted top, which needs expensive repairs, in storage. That I should even think of removing the top is a sign of how profoundly my regard for old-timey possessions has shifted. I have resigned my position as curator of childhood dreams.

We’ll discuss the whys and wherefores some other time. Right now, it’s enough to say that, after the successful detachment of the piece’s two halves, I had to figure out what do with the contents, which ocvered almost every surface in the living room. I not only did the figuring out, but I went to the store and bought provisions for an impromptu dinner party. Discretion forbids my enumerating the guests, but Quatorze and Fossil Darling were of the party, which wouldn’t have taken place without Quatorze’s incredibly savvy assistance. Knowing Quatorze as I do, I have no business saying “incredibly,” but I claim poetic license.

***

We all had a great evening, and nobody stayed up too late. But I was shocked to be reminded by Fossil, when we talked the next morning at around noon, that I’d agreed to cross town for dinner at Shun Lee West. It was the last thing I wanted to do, if only because it involved leaving the building and crossing a street. Many streets! But one street was too many. Among the consequences of having a great time with friends the night before was the fierce desire to see nobody the morning after.

I went about my usual Saturday business, listening to opera and tidying the apartment. (I also ran two dishwasher loads.) But I never went for five minutes without worrying about dinner. Should I cancel? I wanted to cancel, but I was also suspicious of this desire. Why did I want to stay home on a Saturday night, cleaning out the refrigerator, when I could be enjoying Peking duck at Shun Lee West? And don’t give me that crap about how hard it is to get from Yorkville to Lincoln Center.

All afternoon this went on. Should I cancel? Or should I just go? And, if I decided to cancel, when should I tell Fossil Darling? What was the latest polite moment for letting him know that the reservation ought to be changed? Six o’clock, I decided.

There was so much that I wanted to do at home!  After tidying the rooms, and cleaning out the refrigerator, I planned to go through the mail. (A three-foot stack! Okay, mostly catalogues.) Then I would assemble a couple of cool new playlists. The gernaiums would be dead-headed! And maybe, if I was really dutiful, I’d write up a page or two for Portico.

The urge to write was kindled by Eric Patton’s latest entry at SORE AFRAID. On the eve of his fortieth birthday, Eric has been writing poignantly about the passage of time and the disappointment of early dreams, usually without calling attention it, but occasionally unfurling a banner:

We headed out to the Teas.  They were not very crowded.  I decided that I really liked the Madonna song of the summer, although the lyrics seemed to be mocking me on such a sad day.  Everybody wants to party with you?  It’s a celebration?  No more.

The wistfulness intensified with each parting ferry.  I wanted to stand atop the day and yell “stop”!

The last statement is truly worthy of Wallace Stevens, don’t you think? All right, it’s a tad emphatic. But when I read Eric’s entries, I feel that I’m reading Proust in English for the first time. My desire to encourage Eric is not unencumbered by the fanciful idea that, someday, readers might think of Marcel as the French Patton. But genug schon with the mash notes.  That the scene of Eric’s elegizing is Fire Island Pines simply ups the poignancy. I think: nearly thirty years ago, when I was not quite ten years younger than Eric is now, I drank even more deeply of the draught of Piney nostalgia. At the end of the summer of 1981, I did not tell myself that it was the end of the summer of 1981. What I told myself was that I should never be back. If I ever set foot on the dock by the Boatel and the Pavilion and the Miramar again, it wouldn’t be for many, many years; and, in fact, it has not yet happened.

What I learned in the Pines in 1981, at the beginning of the life in New York City that I had dreamed about since my childhood — a mere sixteen miles from Times Square and more dozens of layers of social awareness than I could count — was that familiarity, for me, would lead to unhappiness. If I ate the cookies that movies and magazines had made so attractive and appetizing, I’d always know where I was, but where I’d be would be in misery. I decided, that summer, against being miserable. The alternative was: difficulty. I settled on figuring things out for myself. It was not necessarily an intelligent to do. If the Internet had not been made available to civilians, I’d be worrying about mildew on the monarda, and wishing more than anything else that my lupines would prosper. I don’t regret my stint as a gardener in Litchfield County (all right, New Milford).  But the idea that I should find satisfaction in the health of a bed of plants makes me laugh now. I’m not that good man.

***

Between five and six, I slowly ran out of steam. It also happened that, minutes after the stroke of six, I finished the apartment-tidying. I put the vacuum cleaner and the Pledge Clean away, and threw the dustrags in the laundry. I could call Fossil — or I could stop whining and just go, like a grown-up. Let me tell you: being me wasn’t fun! Then the complexion of the matter underwent a hormonal change.

It took, I should say, five or six seconds. Earlier, I’d thought about walking over to Fossil’s apartment before dinner. How virtuous would that be!

Even more: how solitary. But this scheme was premised on the idea that I would put off the Saturday housekeeping until Sunday, and spend the day either following through on the myriad projects that detaching the top of the breakfront inaugurated (I’ll spare you the list) or reading Chris Wickham’s riveting book about the early Middle Ages: a day of bourgeois Talmud. But now that it was six, and I had spent hours on my feet, dusting and vacuuming, I was hardly keen on more exercise. And yet, within those five or six seconds, it became the thing that I wanted more than anything else. I showered and dressed with the haste of someone who had just received a coveted invitation. As I did, I thought of this passage in Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland. 

There followed as pause during which, I decided, this woman was considering the retrospective significance of a taxi journey up the Edgware Road many years ago. Her hand made its way up to my thigh and tenderly applied pressure there. “Anyhow, I think that’s why I trust you,” she said, her nearest eye darting at me and then back at the ceiling. “Because you were a complete gentleman.” The phrase made her laugh loudly, and she began to make a lesiurely, more sensual motion with her hand. I reached out to touch her breasts, and it asonished me how much pleasure this gave me. Suddenly, in spite of all the notions with which I’d dismissed the possibility, this woman had my attention. I was fully alert now and fully aware of her particularity.  

I was fully aware of a desire to be out on the street, walking through the beautiful twilight toward Lincoln Center. The fear of getting mixed up, yet again, on the far side of the Sheep Meadow was just the right kind of bother. I’d figure out when to stop heading toward the towers of the Time Warner Center, even if it did mean traipsing through the Tavern on the Green’s parking lot. I’d step into an elevator and ride the nineteen floors to Fossil’s feeling as solid as mortal man can feel. Oblivious of all the crap. 

You have to admire the quiet, understated way in which Hoboken police dealt with reports that a man was brandishing a gun on his front stoop.

After the man was arrested, Hoboken police and the Jersey City police Emergency Services Unit searched the man’s house and back yard, Fitzsimmons said.

They found “a number of rifles and shotguns,” Fitzsimmons said, adding that as many as 30 were found in an initial search. “The search continues at the moment,” he said.

“There were a few hand grenades that had no powder in them, no pin,” Fitzsimmons said. The discovery of the grenades and several vintage weapons led police to believe that the man may be a collector.

Police evacuated the houses on either side of the gunman’s home as a precaution, but Fitzsimmons said it did not appear that neighbors were in immediate danger. Police officers closed the block to vehicle and foot traffic and notified nearby schools, including the Hoboken Charter School at 4th and Garden streets, the Brandt Middle School at 9th and Garden streets and Demarest High School, at 4th Street and Bloomfield Avenue, Dawn Zimmer, the city’s acting mayor, said Friday.

Neighbors and area merchants said the incident left them rattled.

Sometimes it seems as though cops just like the way they do things.

¶ Matins: An attempt to “urbanize” Tyson’s Corner, Virginia appears to have spooked the planners: they don’t want anything too urban!

¶ Lauds: With Julie & Julia about to open in France, a number of critics are echoing Mme Brassart.

¶ Prime: A word about arbitrage from Felix Salmon. Actually, two words:

• Picking up nickels in front of a steamroller
• Don’t try this at home.

¶ Tierce: As if it had been waiting for rifts within the Anglican Communion to threatens its future, Canterbury Cathedral has begun to fall down in earnest. (via The Morning News)

¶ Sext: Fast Food: The DeStyling.

¶ Nones: Has or has not fighting broken out between China and India? Officially, not. But the media on both sides pipe a different tune. Amit Baruah reports from the BBC.

¶ Vespers: A nice, long, faux-depressing, genuinely funny look at the publishing biz, by former Random House editor Daniel Menaker.

¶ Compline: Paul Graham on The List of N Things: sometimes a simple list fits the case exactly, but, too often, it’s “a degenerate case of essay.” (via  Mnémoglyphes)

Bon weekend à tous!

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A good day, lots done — it began, really, last night, when I went to the Museum with Ms NOLA. I had a ticket for two to a members’ preview for the new small show, The Milkmaid. Built entirely around one not-very-large Vermeer, on loan for a month or two from the Rijksmuseum, the show gathers the five Vermeers that the Museum already owns (only two of which really compete with The Milkmaid — although I’m very fond of The Woman with a Lute) together with a few other thematically related pictures by Ter Borch, de Hooch, and so on. The paintings don’t begin to fill the available wall space, which gives the show an air of desperation that we may learn to see as something else.

The Milkmaid isn’t the picture that I should have chosen to borrow from Amsterdam — that would have been The Little Street, a picture that I must have looked at for twenty minutes when I stood in front of it, in 2002. The milkmaid has always made me feel uncomfortably warm. She seems to be perspiring, and her jacket looks like a corset. But Walter Liedtke’s bulletin-length essay, which I was reading earlier this evening, is increasing my appreciation. I’m learning to regard the milkmaid as chaste and serene.

The Milkmaid, which I’m pretty sure I saw often as a child, on the walls of older people’s apartments, also makes me feel uncomfortably stifled, as if I were living in a room whose windows could not be opened. When I was little, chaste serenity was not much of an attraction. It would have been beyond me to suppose that the serving girl hated her job and felt underpaid, but I could see that she was expected to Be Good. I associated being good with frustration. You could try all you liked, but you would never, ever want to Be Good. It goes without saying that Being Good involved fantastically unnatural behavior, such as Sitting Still and Being Quiet. And wearing excruciatingly itchy wool trousers. As a sort of not-really reward, Being Good featured the  bonus-points feature called Offering It Up.

This will sound like a child’s complaint about the relative dullness of adult life, but as I saw it, the adults were the real sufferers. They had simply given up, capitulated, lowered the drawbridge and allowed tedium to overrun the citadel. Adults could no longer help Being Good. Their artificial smiles would always make horror-film zombies look amateurish by comparison. You can still see the kind of meaninglessness that I’m talking about in the smirks of society dames (never the heroines) in movies from the early Thirties. These women were still living in the Twenties.

You may think of the Twenties as a decade of gin, jazz, and chrome, but it was in fact the terminal moraine of respectability. Moated by Prohibition, the American home attained unimagined levels of stupefied entropy. The choice of colors was limited to sepia and écru. Your mother’s hemline might reveal a bit of darkly-stockinged ankle, but from there on up she was either a scarecrow or a Hefty Bag stuffed with down pillows.

The silver lining in all of this came from living in the Fifties. Ordinarily, I think a child might have dreaded the future, horrified by the doom of growing up to become a replacement for these older people. In the Fifties, though, it was clear that Nothing Was Going To Be The Same. The drawback to this silver lining was that it made the old people who were going to stay the same seem dead while they were still alive. They were already as chained to Yesterday as was Vermeer’s milkmaid.

¶ Matins: Is there such a thing as good luck? Ayn Rand’s fans are certain that there is not: hard work is everything. Jonathan Chait assesses the Rand legacy in light of this conviction, at The New Republic. (via The Morning News)

¶ Lauds: Our latest discovery: MetEveryday. (Thanks, Ms NOLA!)

¶ Prime: David Leonhardt profiles Robert Shiller — in the Yale Alumni Magazine, naturally. (via Marginal Revolution)

¶ Tierce: A violin repair shop in Morningside Hides has been told to cease and desist from violating antiquated zoning restrictions. No, noise is not the issue.

¶ Sext: Links to an assortment of Lost Symbol reviews, at Speakeasy.

¶ Nones: True-life ghost fleet — container ships and other freighters parked off of Singapore. (via  The Infrastructurist)

¶ Vespers: John Curran, author of Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks, lists then top ten titles in her ouevre. How many have you read? (Film adaptations don’t count!) (via Campaign for the American Reader)

¶ Compline: Jason Kottke asks (in a footnote, no less):

You’ve got to wonder when Apple is going to change the name of the iPhone. The phone part of the device increasingly seems like an afterthought, not the main attraction. The main benefit of the device is that it does everything. How do you choose a name for the device that has everything? Hell if I know.

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My mother-in-law passed away this morning, between eight and ten o’clock. She was formidable and exacting, but we all got used to that a long time ago. There is a ghastly ripped-out hole where she used to be.

When my own, my own adoptive mother died, I had just turned 29. We were on pretty good terms toward the end, as she shuttled back and forth between M D Anderson and the house in Tanglewood. Two months before she died, she asked me if I would do a dinner party for her. There were two couples whom she wished to entertain. Of course I was very happy to do it — amazed, really, that my culinary ambitions were no longer a dirty secret (a boy who wants to cook!). I don’t remember what dishes I prepared, or whether I joined the others at the table (I like to think that, feeling profesional, I didn’t), but I do remember that it all went very nicely, even though it was obviously odd: my mother was already such a shadow of herself, physically, that she might as well have been sitting up in her casket.

Whatever the guests made of the occasion, I knew that I’d been recognized. Not accepted, perhaps; I don’t think that my mother could ever accept me, even if she knew me now. Her idea of big strong men was fairly blinding and closed to nuance. Later, when my father told me that he and my mother had (latterly, at least) assumed that I was homosexual, I had to smile at the easiness of the packaging: as awful (to them) as homosexuality must have been, it was preferable to inscrutability. I don’t think that it ever occurred them that, as the child of other, unknown people, I might, as a matter of course, be inscrutable to them. I was at least, finally, recognized as such — inscrutable, much as the United States was recognized by the signatories to the Treaty of Paris, in 1783.

Then my mother died. As I said the other day, I was overcome by paroxysmal sobs when I saw my mother laid out in her casket, dead dead dead. Yes, it was her — but it was also death. I learned that that’s what happens: death is a body snatcher that replaces the person you knew. The person you knew is gone; the imposter in the casket makes you want to throw up, or scream.

I got over the hysteria pretty quickly. But ten years would pass before I would feel firm about regarding my mother’s belittlements as wrong. I would come to understand why she belittled me, but I would never forgive her. They say that that’s bad — that you really ought to forgive. I couldn’t agree more, if what you’re talking about is resentment. I don’t resent the way that my mother treated me. I simply refuse to excuse it. I don’t “hate” her (whatever that means). I don’t wish that she’d been taught the error of her ways in some dramatically satisfying way. (“All I want is ‘Enry ‘Iggins ‘ead!”) I know that she thought that she was “within her rights.” But I also know that, when it came to meaning well, she could be lazy and self-serving (I remember being shocked, as a teenager, to discover that, although my mother had lots of rules, she was governed by no principles.) So I refuse to say that she “meant well.” That’s what not forgiving her amounts to. It’s a judgment, and, having made it, I’m done. I talk about it too much, I suspect, but what I’m talking about, what I’m trying to get right, is the quality of being done.

As for my father, I forgave him everything — I was a slut of forgiveness. It’s rare now, but he still does occasionally spend time with me in a dream. He is always smiling and wise and patient and fond of me. He was all of those things in real life — but he was also (and this I cut from my dream dad) completely at sea about fatherhood. He might as well have been standing there with the manual in his hands, disconcerted by an unhelpful index. There was no entry for the likes of me, and he didn’t find “weirdness – general” particularly interesting. But although he could be very stern from time to time, and extremely clear about the obligations of a gentlemen — which never sounded fussy or prim, coming from the son of placid Clinton, Iowa that he was (I’ve even forgiven Clinton!) — he never made me feel like a reject.

I’m already older than my mother was when she died, and about ten years younger than my father when he died. I have come to believe that I understand the world at least as well as my parents did — which is to say that I’m  no longer invested in trying to convince them that they were wrong about it. I’d much rather convince you that what they were right about — all that they gave me — hasn’t been thrown away.

¶ Matins: Given the lunatic tone of national discourse these days, it’s refreshing to hear the “P” word spoken with such vigor and clarity:

Obama is sometimes faulted for conducting government by speech. But this speech was part of a patient strategy that, despite August’s rough weather, is looking increasingly sound.

Hendrick Hertzberg in The New Yorker.

¶ Lauds: Museum Director Thomas Campbell outlines his plans in an interview with The Art Newspaper’s Joshua Edward Kaufman.

¶ Prime: President Obama’s Federal Hall speech yesterday elicits interesting responses from Felix Salmon and James Surowiecki.

¶ Tierce: As deeply as our eidtor sympathises with Malcolm Gladwell, Sean Macauley’s totally high-school prank makes us laugh, even if it is a bit nasty. (What high school prank isn’t at least a bit nasty?)

¶ Sext: All of a sudden, everyone’s a racist. Well, simmer down. As Abe Sawyer suggests at The Awl, it’s probably anarchism. Racism is just one of the “tools currently available with which to ‘win’.”

¶ Nones: Mark Garlasco’s hobby — collecting Nazi military memorabilia — will probably cost him his job, now that it has “armed right-wing fanatics” critical of Human Rights Watch, the humanitarian organization which Mr Garlasco served as a military analyst.

¶ Vespers: On the anniversary of David Foster Wallace’s death, Jean Ruaud writes about the rewards of struggling with Infinite Jest all the way through to the end. [fr]

¶ Compline: An interesting, if not quite lucid, essay on the problem of giving unconditional love to a badly-behaving child, by Alfie Kohn. (more…)

Exit Kathleen — to North Carolina. At about two this afternoon, she had a phone call from her father, and learned that her mother’s decline has accelerated. Before seven, she pulled up at her father’s door. (At three, she appeared at the apartment, with a car downstairs waiting to take her to the airport, and threw — and I mean, threw — some clothes into a suitcase. She had the only remaining seat on the only unbooked American Eagle flight to Raleigh-Durham.) Hustle and bustle, and then an unwonted stillness.

The flight was scheduled to take off at 4:25. When I hadn’t heard from Kathleen by ten of five, I concluded that she had taken off more or less on time, and I set out on a walk. The plan — a success — was to stay out until about the time for her touchdown. I hate sitting at home while Kathleen is in the air almost as much as I hate flying myself, and I can alway use the exercise. But I wouldn’t be very imaginative. I took my ordinary route, which my feet can follow without executive input, and when I’d completed my loop through Carl Schurz Park and along the Finley Walk, I kept walking west, to hit up the ATM machine for some cash — I’d given what I had to Kathleen. Crossing Third Avenue, I notice a scaffolding pasted with a sign for Burger Heaven — the upper floors of the building in which the branch is situated are being renovated — and I realized that I’d forgotten all about Burger Heaven.

Not to worry; it was just another sign of my summer depression, which this year, at least, I’d harnessed and exploited. As the weather gets warmer and hazier, my body slows down to the Slowest Possible Denominator. I simply saw to it that I spent this immobile period seated in front of the computer in the only room with supplemental air-conditioning. It was a hugely productive six or seven weeks, but I was still depressed — or, to use the fancy term, in estivation. Rarely leaving the building during daylight hours, I forgot about lots of simple things, eventually. Such as the presence of a Burger King location on Third Avenue, next door to the Orpheum.

I’d had big plans for the day: I was going to write up Sam Shepard’s story in The New Yorker, which I read at the barber shop this morning, and I was going to clean out the refrigerator. The refrigerator is not in the dire state that usually compels clean-outs, but it’s crowded, with half-empty jars of semi-useful substances. Leftovers. I’m quite sure that I’ll find some unusably wilted green beans. I was going to write about that, too. I was going to write about the dinner for three that I made on Friday — our young art-student friend came by to tell us what he’s been up to. I hadn’t cooked for three during the estivation period, as I several culinary stumbles reminded me.

(For example: I was going to accompany the chicken sauté (one of the best I’ve ever cooked) with angel hair pasta. The angel hair pasta is kept in a canister that stands behind the spaghetti canister, so the two canisters were both standing on the counter when the water reached a boil. I was chatting with Devin and sipping white wine — and presently I was wondering what the hell was taking the angel hair so long to cook? And how’d it get so thick?  In the end, we ate truly al dente spaghetti — at the very punto of inedibility.)

I was going to do a lot of things today. But Kathleen’s trips always diminish the quality of the light, and this trip has made me feel that my Persephone has been summoned by her mother to the underworld. The very air is clotted with inanition. I’m glad that Kathleen is where she really does want to be right now; the long-distance perch was vexing her. But I can’t wait to have her back.

¶ Matins: Caleb Crain examines the culture of economic adversity — in the Depression.

¶ Lauds: Holland Cotter hopes that we have seen the last of the blockbuster exhibition.

¶ Prime: Over the weekend, Times columnist Joe Nocera raised the “what if” question about Lehman, speculating that “it had to die to save Wall Street.” James Surowiecki isn’t so sure — and neither are we.

¶ Tierce: More about the clothing style known as “trad”: this time from Joe Pompeo, at the Observer. (via Ivy Style)

¶ Sext: We had never seen a picture of today’s Hilo Hero, Margaret Sanger, before.

¶ Nones: Is Internet opinion in China driving a trade confrontation with the United Statess?

¶ Vespers: At The Second Pass, John Williams passes on The Lost Symbol — in advance.

¶ Compline: At  Good, 10 great urban parks, seen from above at roughly the same scale.

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Is everybody dying? I see that actor Patrick Swayze died today. Of pancreatic cancer — said to be the worst, the most painful cancer that you can have. I never read The Basketball Diaries, by Jim Carroll, who also just died; I never saw the movie with Leonardo di Caprio or read any of Carroll’s poems. Ordinarily, his death is not something that I’d have reason to mention. But every time one of these fellows passes away, I’m more surprised that I’m still standing. Believe me, “personal responsibility” has nothing to do with it.

My mother-in-law is dying. I can say that because she’s past caring about my mentioning it. She is failing very quickly, faster than she thinks — faster, we hope, than the pain of a bad heart can keep up with her exit. We hope that she’ll be able to greet her younger sister this weekend. My mother-in-law is looking forward to that. She’s looking forward to it so keenly that Kathleen has been asked to come down next weekend (the last in September) , so as not to crowd the festivities. One is used to this. I certainly am. My mother’s last words to anybody were addressed to me. “Did you put the leftover ravioli in the freezer?” she wanted to know. “Wanted to know” is an understatement. We are talking about Denial of Death on a Wagnerian scale.

Meanwhile, life is quickening in the East Village. I’d tell you a cute story about that, but I’d be speaking out of turn. I can tell you this, though: my grandson likes Tom Petty’s “Wildflowers.” So does his mom! Which may have something to do with it. I can’t decide whether to get to know the song. Information? Or barging in? All I really want is to live long enough to hold him. Given the fact that Patrick Swayze was in at least ten thousand times better shape than I am, I wonder how it is that I’m even here.

When, just before my mother’s wake, they opened the casket, so that my father, my sister, and I could take one last look, I collapsed in heaving sobs. It was very dramatic, but it was wholly genuine — part of the panic in my sobbing was the surprise of feeling so intensely about someone I had disliked for so long. At my father’s dying, in contrast, I wept once — when the priest uttered (in English) the et cum Lazaro line that Fauré sets so beautifully at the end of his highly idiosyncratic Requiem. It’s funny, but I always thought of my father as a little boy, even when I was the little boy. There was nothing immature about him; I don’t mean that he was an overgrown adolescent. Nor was there anything youthfully “creative.” He was simply somebody who struck me as never quite getting used to the miracle of things. He was hopelessly impractical about all domestic realities, and I loved that about him to the bottom of my heart. If  he had been my real father, I couldn’t have adored him more. But I didn’t adore him at all. I just loved him. I’m not sure that he ever knew that, or that it meant much to him. No matter.

I am of two minds about dying. Part of me has been packed and ready to go for years. A somewhat bigger part is still too egotistically attached to my work at The Daily Blague and at Portico. I haven’t yet turned either site into the souvenir-monument that I’d like it to be. (Little did you know that you were reading a tombstone-in-progress!). But death is for survivors; the dying too quickly forget what has happened. 

A small, small part of me knows what’s really difficult. Our bodies don’t matter (not to us) when we’re dead. The faces that we saw in the mirror every morning simply cease to be when the life goes out of them. What matters, to those who survive us, is what they can make of us. The legacy that we may think that we leave is in fact something that the people after us fashion out of our leftovers. Our nakedness in death is nothing to our helplessness in the judgment of survivors.

There’s one thing we all agree about, though, no? Let it happen before we know it. Let us cheat death by not recognizing it, when it doffs its hat. Let us be busy urging the freezing of the leftover ravioli.

New at Portico: Last week, we finished a very meaty and thought-provoking book of American history, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920, by Jackson Lears. Among other things, Rebirth is a meditation on the noxious potential of “good ideas.”

As the historian Richard Slotkin has brilliantly shown, since the early colonial era a faith in regeneration through violence underlay the mythos of the American frontier. With the closing of the frontier (announced by the US census in 1890), violence turned outward, toward empire. But there was more going on than the refashioning of frontier myth0logy. American longings for renewal continued to be shaped by persistent evangelical traditions, and overshadowed by the shattering experience of the Civil War. American seekers merged Protestant dreams of spirtual rebirth with secular projects of purification — cleansing the body politic os secessionist treason during the war and political corruption afterward, reasserting elite power against restive farmers and workers, taming capital in the name of the public good, reviving individual and national vitality by banning the use of alcohol, granting women the right to vote, disenfranchising African-Americans, restricting the flow of immigrants, and acquiring an overseas empire.

The must-read book in this week’s Book Review is The Hawk and the Dove, Nicholas Thompson’s book about his grandfather, Paul Nitze’s, and Nitze’s colleague and sparring partner, George Kennan. But the must-read review is Leon Wieseltier’s estocada of Norman Podhoretz’s cranky new book. For a link, turn to the Book Review review.

This week’s New Yorker story, “The Lower River,” poses all the usual needling challenges that we have come to expect from Paul Theroux, whom, even though you didn’t ask, we want you to know that we think of as one of the unhappiest writers ever to draw a breath. Perhaps the unhappiness is reserved for the writing. “The Lower River” is a good story withal, and we recommend reading it.

This week, we went to see Mike Judge’s Extract, and we’d like to share a little souvenir of the film that we nicked from IMDb. Until you’ve seen Extract, you may think that this photo of Dustin Milligan is a slice of light beefcake, but afterward, if you file the image away as “How to Clean a Pool,” it’ll make you giggle.

For once, what I can’t wait for isn’t next week’s episode (although the teaser was very teasing!) but for tomorrow’s commentary. What will the young ‘uns make of this evening’s window on giving birth, Sixties style? Perhaps the Golden Age of martinis and men on top won’t look quite so attractive. But who knows?

In the waiting room, Don spends a long night with a guard from Sing Sing — the prison in Ossining (Don’s suburb) that stands right on — in, really — the Hudson River (hence “going up the river” for “going to jail”) — and a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red. We know that Betts is having a terrible time, if only because she’s not in the mood to be birthin’ babies; we’re also told that the guard’s baby is positioned for a breech birth — a sticky wicket even today. What will happen? The fact that the fathers aren’t in the delivery room, knowing what will happen as it happens, must be shocking to husbands under forty. (When my daughter was born, in 1972, the obstetrician — a woman! — made it clear from the start that she excluded fathers from the proceedings, a sign that things were changing.)

A nurse eventually appears and tells the guard that his wife and son are doing “fine.” This news is immediately contradicted: it turns out that the mother lost a great deal of blood and can’t be seen right now, but the baby is in the nursery. (Maybe that’s a lie, too.) The guard leaves, but not without a fine, almost World-War-II buddy parting from Don. While the guard is all enlisted-man emotion, Don exudes the stoic, silent assurance of the officer class into which we know he made his way by guile: what better preparation for a career in advertising, or, for the matter of that, for patting a new father on the shoulder and telling him that our worst fears are — our fears. If you ask me, Jon Hamm (with the help of some extremely favorable lighting) leapfrogged his way into the Cary Grant class even faster than “Don” joined the officer class.

The other great scene takes place in an elevator. Peter Campbell is feeling his way around the idea that advertising to “Negroes” might be a good business strategy. In this, he is woefully behind the times; it’s as though he’d just discovered the fact that African-Americans buy stuff.  As someone who’s always signed up for Schadenfreude events starring Pete Campbell, I was delighted to see Roger Sterling ream him a new you-know-what, but I found the elevator scene excruciating. Pete actually stops the elevator so that he can have a serious heart-to-heart with Hollis, the black elevator operator, about television-buying habits.

What horrified me wasn’t that Pete has no sense of boundaries. What horrified me was that nobody in Pete Campbell’s class had a sense of boundaries. I know, because I belonged to the surburban auxiliary. It would not have crossed anyone’s mind that an elevator operator’s privacy was being breached. Privacy was something that separated us, the people at the top, from one another. In our imagination, other people were unencumbered by privacy concerns — lucky them! (That’s why so many well-educated and sweet-natured boomers became hippies.) If you pointed out to a Pete Campbell that he had just been intolerably presumptuous with Hollis, he would be shocked. He’d have seen it like this: the elevator operator, naturally shy and retreating, would need a certain amount of convincing that Pete was actually interested in his opinions. Pete’s shutting off the elevator would be the convincing. What “Negro” wouldn’t be grateful for Pete’s prying questions? To be recognized as a person with personal opinions would be tantamount to wanting to share them. Actually, reality television is based on this premise today.

Not for the first time, I thanked the powers that be that my birthdate fell no earlier in time, and that I’m around to see the very different world that we live in today. Getting from there to here hasn’t been without its bumps, and, again not for the first time, I applaud Matthew Weiner and his crew for mapping some of those bumps so evocatively. How they’ve done it — in many cases, their parents weren’t even married when the Mad Men episodes were taking place — is one of the great creative mysteries.

Chieli Minucci’s “Endless Summer” comes from an album of the same name that I bought at HMV one day, when there was still an HMV store where Best Buy is now. I had been spending a lot of time in the jazz section, building up a basic collection of classics. On this particular day, “Endless Summer” was playing on the shop’s sound system, and, despite long experience with the disappointments of buying music that’s playing in record stores, I had to have it. I had to have it even after the clerk told me that the rest of the album was “not as good.” And even though that turned out to be true, I have loved “Endless Summer” ever since. Why?

The answer must lie in the mystery of the harmonies. “Endless Summer,” part riff, part tune, never actually comes to an end, but keeps modulating into repetitions: it ought to be quite tedious. But it triggers a composite sense memory that lies very close to my sense of well-being: having spent a summer afternoon at the pool, I’ve showered and dressed and am about to go out for the evening, probably to a party at somebody else’s house. I am anywhere between sixteen and thirty years old, and I am probably in Houston. It could be 1977, when the easiest summer of my life. The sorrow of my mother’s illness and death was behind me, and the travails of law school lay unimaginably ahead. I had moved back to my parents’ house in Tanglewood, to help to take care of the place while my mother failed, and then to keep my father company in my desultory fashion. I was through with Houston in the way that you are through with high school after graduation. I had a lot to learn about enjoying life, but, at 29, I thought that I knew what I needed to know about having a good time. I would be in my fifties when I woke up from this delusion.

I have no desire to go back. It’s like the summer during which Kathleen and I spent alternate weekends at Fossil’s house in the Pines — great fun, but once was enough. Everything that was scintillating about 1977 is there in “Endless Summer,” even though the song hadn’t been written yet. Perhaps that’s the secret of its appeal: it carries no associations with the period, in the way that favorite pop songs do. (At the time, I was discovering Manhattan Transfer and August Darnell, and my favorite song was Al Stewart’s “Year of the Cat” — music that stirs up more realistic and complicated memories of that summer.) It just reminds me of what it felt like to feel good.

If the parties never lived up to expectations — never nearly — “Endless Summer” does not remind me of that disappointment. It simply distills the pleasure of looking forward to something, such that now, when I hear the song, I feel the pleasure without actually looking forward to anything at all, except, perhaps, the possibility that, just this once, the song itself will be endless.

A routine training exercise in the Potomac River this morning — “planned in advance” by the Coast Guard — “took on a life of its own.” Just another Friday as usual, right?

The president’s motorcade had just crossed the Potomac, on its way back to the White House after a ceremony at the Pentagon honoring those who died there, when chatter on a marine radio channel used by the Coast Guard and monitored by the media told of shots being fired on the river.

No shots were actually fired in Friday’s training exercise that appears to have been routine in everything except for the date on which it was conducted. But while the confusion lasted only a few minutes, it was enough to scramble F.B.I. agents and halt departures from Reagan National Airport near the river from 10:08 a.m. until 10:30, Diane Spitaliere, a spokeswoman for the Federal Aviation Administration, told The Associated Press.

Much of the confusion seemed to have been stirred by reports on CNN, based on the radio chatter. Anyone listening to the marine frequency heard simulated instructions to fire 10 rounds at suspicious boats in the river. By the time it became clear that there actually were no shots and no suspicious boats, the confusion had taken on a life of its own, however brief.

Time to watch Idiocracy again.

¶ Matins: James Surowiecki assesses President Obama’s Health Care speech, finding it a success.

¶ Lauds: A Portrait of a Man, bequeathed to the Museum as a Velásquez, demoted to “studio of Velésquez” by skeptical curators, is revealed to be a Velásquez again — after cleaning and conservation.

¶ Prime: Megan McArdle explains why investment bankers make so much money. Think: drop in the bucket. Also: movie trailer. (via Felix Salmon)

¶ Tierce: Who needs the movie? While planning your weekend getaway, you can have your fill of prison scenes at Scouting New York.

¶ Sext: It has been a while since we were treated to a gallery of weird old LP jackets. This one, it seems, comes from Russia. (Don’t be put off by the first, rather distubring one.)

¶ Nones: Hugo Chávez tears another page out of the Castro playbook, and sucks up to Mother Russia. And we thought that we’d won the Cold War once and for all!

¶ Vespers: Richard Nash writes about Ted Striphas’s The Late Age of Print. The book, which assesses the history of publishing and bookselling in clearly commercial terms, sounds compelling, but the review is an absolute must. (Grocery stores?)

¶ Compline: How two 75 year-old former bombshells couldn’t be more different, after all these years. Which would be your choice, stray cats or tomcats? (via Arts Journal)

Bon Weekend à tous!

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The weather is distinctly autumnal, and I am coming back to life. One of these days I will be able to repeat after me: Summer is Depressing! Heat! Haze! Humidity! No wonder I shut down. While I’m  not crazy about slush and short days, I can live with them easily enough. But I really cannot abide the “seasonable” weather of July and August.

After lunch, I went out to drop the bills at the Post Office — the mailbox that used to stand outside the Viand, on the southeast corner of 86th and Second, has been removed, presumably because of the subway construction (forfend!) — I walked over to Best Buy, to pick up a sheath for my new Nano. I’m not happy with what I bought; I don’t trust it not to open in the middle of a walk, casting the player to the ground, where it would break, having pulled free of the headphones on the way down (the casting-floorwards part happened in the bathroom before I took my walk; thanks to a small rug, the breaking part did not happen). I ought to have ordered something online; the selection at Best Buy was really unsatisfactory. Not content to spend a mere $22, I looked for a DVD to buy as well, and I chose Love, Actually, a movie that I rented not long after it became available, perhaps in 2004. In those days, I didn’t know who half the actors were, and I wasn’t sure about the slice-of-life aspect — all the independent love stories that converge on a Christmas pageant. I was fine with it tonight, though. I couldn’t see for about forty minutes after the film ended, my eyes were so salty. Is 2004 really five years ago? Increasingly, it is.

Once upon a time — a lot longer ago than 2004 — Kathleen and I lived in a one-bedroom apartment on the seventh floor of this building. The man who lived next door to us still lives next door to that apartment — or at least he still lives on the seventh floor. The man who took our apartment lives on the eighth floor now, but he is still very much here in the building. The next-door neighbor is tall and only slightly stooped; his hair has always been white, and he looks as though he ought to be running a general store in the heartland; but he has had a very beautiful Asian girlfriend for a very long time (perhaps she is his wife!). The man who took our apartment is, we were told at the time of our move upstairs, an economist from Russia. He has a teenaged daughter now — perhaps she is older now (I haven’t seen her in a while — which is what happens to children you’ve watched grow up, between the ages of 17 and 30). Here’s the thing: neither of these guys looks a day older. Than twenty-odd-closer-to-thirty years ago! It’s true that I’ve seen them over the years. Now that I think of it, none of the other residents whom I’ve watched age over the years looks any older, either! How is that? Aside from a few cases of serious illness, a few instances of drastic weight loss, usually involving wheelchairs, and always ending with a death notice posted at the elevator, everyone looks just the same as he or she did in 1985! Oh, also except for the man who likes to pass out cookies in the middle of the day — he really is a sweetheart, although I can never really think of anything apt to say to him, exccept “No, thank you” — and who stopped wearing a hairpiece about two years ago. That was pretty drastic! But we’ve all gotten used to the new look; we always knew that it had nothing to do with chemo.

Kathleen worked late this evening, so I fixed myself an impromptu chicken salad on the early side, while I was watching the beginning of Love, Actually. Same old same old: yogurt avocado dressing, with the other half of the avocado cubed, along  with ditto chicken, tomato and mushrooms, and a sprinkling of toasted walnuts, the whole topped with a happy grating of Maytag blue. The mushrooms and the blue cheese pushed the concoction a bit over the top — not as inedibly as if I’d crumbled a few pieces of bacon into the mix, but you know what I mean: a Richie Richness. The walnuts were slightly past their prime — I am no less sensitive to the rancid turn of fats than the princess was to the pea — but the salad was tasty withal, and I managed to put most of away. What I had trouble with was putting down the dinner-time read. Having nibbled on the sexy chapters already, I’ve begun Chris Wickham’s The Inheritance of Rome at the beginning. As I read, nodding, I realized that it is time to dump Gibbon in the tip. The Roman Empire declined and fell? Good riddance! Renaissance nostalgia for the enlightened Rome of serene peristyles, in which Cicero spoke his perfect Latin, is totally bogus. Cicero was hacked to death in a mafia-style hit. Check it out. 

When I got back from my walk, I turned on the laptop in the living room. It was cool enough (plenty beaucoup!) to work in there, and I had a book to write up. As the computer booted up, I did the nesting thing, getting my the book and a mug of tea. There was something that I was supposed to get from the blue room, but I couldn’t think what it was. Without getting carried away, I sat down in the living room and started to write. I hadn’t got far when the doorbell rang. That’s when I remembered what  needed to get in the blue room: cash for a deliveryman tip. I blame the cool weather. I’m so happy with the rain and the brume and the generally Novemberish conditions — what can I say; I’m a child of the North Atlantic and I find its miseries validating! — that I forgot what I was looking for.

¶ Matins: Citizens United v Federal Election Commission: that’s the case to watch. A special hearing before the Supreme Court took place yesterday. Do corporations have the right to free speech?

¶ Lauds: The other day, we discovered a Web site that we expect to visit regularly: ARTCAT. Not only will we stay up-to-date on gallery openings, but we’ll get to read some priceless press releases.

¶ Prime: The Timothy Mayopoulos story will probably not be told by Mr Mayopoulos himself — not, at least, without permission from his former client, Bank of America — which summarily dismissed him just when you’d have thought that it needed him most. Why?

¶ Tierce: A wake-up call that few Americans will heed. “United Nations Conference calls for new global currency.” (via Joe.My.God)

¶ Sext: Alex Balk diagrams yesterday’s Maureen Dowd.

¶ Nones: Good to know: “Brazil in ‘fugitive haven’ fight.”

¶ Vespers: Ellen Moody considers Paul Scott and his fiction — with pix from the mini-serial adaptation of The Jewel in the Crown.

¶ Compline: How do we forget? It seems that we don’t. Rather, we mislay. Jonah Lehrer on “persistent memories.” (more…)

Given my quiet, out-of-the-way type of life, it’s hardly unlikely that I’d be totally unaware of a fantastic French movie that stars just about everybody — Romain Duris, Juliette Binoche, Fabrice Lucchini, François Cluzet, Albert du Pontel, and — one of the two female stars of Inglourious Basterds (shown below), Mélanie Laurent. I’m sure that Ms NOLA will tell me tomorrow morning that she has known about Paris for ages. I’ll learn that it was shown to a select crowd at Bryant Park one evening in July.

Well, just let them mock me. The simple fact is that I came home from Quentin Tarantino’s movie last week and headed straight to the computer, on which I ordered Cédric Klapisch’s latest film in a trice, from Amazonne. In the old days — but never mind the old days. In the new days, I received the package, as a matter of course, within the week. Voilà!

Paris is a great treat. Its story seems to reminisce at least three or four recent French hits: Paris je t’aime, Fauteuils d’orchestre, Le temps qui reste, and Fin d’Août, début Septembre (the last of which is not quite so recent). It really belongs to Ms Binoche, who deserves to have a photograph posted here. But it wouldn’t be a flattering photograph, because the style of the movie dictates that the actress look her age. She’s still gorgeous, of course, but not gorgeous in the way that Ms Laurent is gorgeous. Not any more. Ms Laurent, for her part, promises never to look a day older — in the same way that Catherine Deneuve has never looked a day older (only a day better).

Maybe this is cheating, but at the end, I was only too happy to bear in mind that Mr Duris, who plays a straight dancer with a bad heart, is himself undoubtedly in the pink, and set to make dozens more movies. Even if IMDb lists only three.