¶ Matins: Steve Coll on the terrorism learning curve, at The New Yorker. We think that the piece is better-written than most political speeches.

¶ Lauds: What a concept: “Sometimes you have to trust the musc.” Anne Midgette (quoting WNO artistic director Christina Scheppelman there) reminds us that lean economic times can inspire truly great opera.

What opera really needs is a fresh crop of audiences: “But opera audiences are far more likely to erupt with excitement at conventions they would find unremarkable or cliched in other mediums, such as a live horse crossing the stage.” If only Ms Midgette would come out and confess that for many “fans,” opera is really a circus, with the singers as high-wire daredevils. (Washington Post; via Arts Journal)

¶ Prime: What happens when the Mashantucket Pequot Tribe cannot service the debt on Foxwoods? Interesting times, according to Peter Applebome. Foreclosure is not an option; as Felix Salmon points out, the Pequots (or some other tribe) are the only possible owners. Foxwoods debt is sovereign debt. On the bright side, at least one Foxwoods visitor smells the problem with casinos. (NYT)

¶ Tierce: When did Cotton become King? Robert Behre rips through the history of Southern agriculture in five very readable pages. The brisk pace makes it easy to see that, as frontier settlements gave way to plantations, slaves, originally extended-family members, were commoditized to suit crops. (HistoryNet; via The Morning News)

¶ Sext: Let’s hear it for Roxxxy. Didn’t Grant Fjermedal predict this, in The Tomorrow Makers? It must be Today! (HiloBrow)

¶ Nones: The news from Venezuela couldn’t be drearier. As the Chávez regime effectively nationalizes consumer businesses, the oldest duel in South America (between oligarchs and populists) is restaged for the umpteenth time. (BBC News)

¶ Vespers: Without using the word, everyone is talking about the caesura in Joshua Ferris’s new novel, The Unnamed: after two hundred pages of “longueurs” (The New Yorker), the story picks up. (The Second Pass)

¶ Compline: “File Under ‘better late than never’,” says Dan Hill of his tardy write-up of a talk delivered at Postopolis! LA last April. Better late than never indeed, to hear LAPD counter-terrorism chief Michael Downing answer questions linking police work (especially regarding gangs and/or terrorists) and urban design.

As Mr Hill concludes, “Downing had the wit to explore it in accessible and meaningful fashion – even if his talk left as many questions hanging in the air over downtown LA as there were helicopters circling overhead.” It’s a start. (City of Sound)

On Sunday, I rented two film titles that seem to go together in my mind, and discovered that I’m  not the only one: on each DVD, the final preview before the feature is the other movie.

It was only when I watched these movies that I remembered why I wanted to see them again. Junebug: Amy Adams and Alessandro Nivola. I don’t think that I knew who either of them were when I saw Junebug the first time. Thumbsucker: Tilda Swinton and Walter Kirn. Walter Kirn isn’t in Thumbsucker, of course; he wrote the novel on which it is based. (He is in Up in the Air, though, even though he’s not credited — I’m sure that he is! I’m probably wrong, though, since IMDb never misses these things. What’s this? Walter Kirn is in Thumbsucker. But that’s not why I wanted to see it.)

I remembered the atmosphere of Junebug fairly well, but I wasn’t sure that I’d seen Thumbsucker before until it started — the old names-and-faces problem.

Considering the number of DVDs that I own, and the rashness with which I acquire new ones, it might seem odd that neither of these pictures is in my library. It didn’t seem odd to me though, as I sat through them a second time. Thumbsucker is something of a bad dream, and Junebug is a nightmare.

Thumbsucker begins, for me, when Justin (Lou Pucci) gets the acceptance letter from NYU. It ends about five minutes later, with the credits. Most of the film is an exercise in throat-clearing, and that seems to be the point: isn’t America’s throat interesting? And isn’t Oregon beautiful! Although I like almost everyone in the very strong cast, nobody does much of anything that’s interesting. (Tilda Swinton is interesting just sitting in a chair, but she’s so much more exciting in The Deep End that the unavoidable comparison makes Thumbsucker seem very flat.) Poor Lou Pucci, with that lanky hair, bears an unsettling resemblance to Tippy Walker, the poor little rich girl in The World of Henry Orient.

Junebug also has a very strong cast, but it’s also put to great use. Amy Adams, Celia Weston, Alessandro Nivola — all wonderful. Embeth Davidtz is really luminous as the international sophisticate (“I was born in Japan.”) for whom central North Carolina is just another exotic location. I missed this the first time. I imagined that her character, Madeleine couldn’t stand being in her new husband’s family home, and must be dying to get back to Chicago. But Madeleine has seen stranger places, and she knows how to take a deep breath, somehow assured that she’ll be home soon enough. I must think of her the next time I’m in an unaccustomed setting. (It won’t do any good; I’m massively uncomfortable wherever I can’t speak freely.)

But the Junebug act that fascinated me earlier this evening was Ben McKenzie. I have no idea why. His character, Johnny Johnsten, is nasty little cracker in the making, an overflowing toilet of sullen resentment and off-loaded blame. He has made his mind up to be defeated, and at some point this will make him dangerous. How Mr McKenzie managed to make Johnny cutely pathetic and warmly funny, I have no idea. Perhaps he reminded me of someone I knew in Texas.

And then there was that hymn, “Come Home,” that Mr Nivola’s character is persuaded to sing at a church supper. This time, I got the hymn, too.

¶ Write my ebook for flat rate! (You Suck at Craigslist)

¶ At least the kid says “Please.” (via reddit)

¶ Matins: The Senate, a contra-democratic institution to begin with, operates according to rules of its own devising that, according to Thomas Geoghegan, are contra-Constitutional. Particularly the rule about filibusters (unlimited debates).  (NYT)

¶ Lauds: We weren’t following The Online Photographer back in 2007, but Mike Johnston’s entry for 28 January of that year, “How to Read a Photographic Book,” deserves the attention of anyone who owns more than a few books of photographs. 

¶ Prime: Is there a housing bubble in China? Or just a severe shortage?  Steven Mufson’s report, at the Washington Post, considers the alternative views. We’re not sure that the distinction is important: in China, instability tends to cascade.(via Marginal Revolution)

¶ Tierce: Jonah Lehrer’s WSJ report on will power dates from the end of last month, but we don’t want you to miss it, especially if you’re looking to build up the muscles in your mind. (via The Frontal Cortex)

¶ Sext: Dave Bry is appalled by the Masons’ decision to induct a new Right Worshipful Grand Master not only in public, but at a convention center. (The Awl)

¶ Nones: This week in the Guardian, a series of articles about powerful international corporations. First up: Gazprom, the world’s largest producer of natural gas.

¶ Vespers: Two classic books about Higher Learning at Cambridge have been republished by Oleander Press. It’s a wonder that you can’t read Cat Burglary. (LRB)

¶ Compline: Further evidence that the Cold War is much missed: “Eurabian” apocalyptics. Justin Vaïsse looks into the clichés of European Islamicization, at Foreign Policy. Mr Vaïsse points out that, outside a few cities, the Moslem population of Europe is unlikely to exceed ten percent. (via The Morning News) 

It’s a relief, really, being back at work. Another week off, and I might have been tempted to stop blogging altogether, and that would have been annoying. The thinking about it. Thinking in the wrong direction. Also: in another week, the forgetting-how-to-do-this, the slippage from memory of everyday, nuts-and-bolts routines, might have become really serious.

***

I worried that a meaty story would break while I was “on vacation” — actually, up to my proverbials in other jobs —  but that didn’t happen. Of all the things that I read during the three weeks away from the Daily Office templates, a passage from Sore Afraid made the deepest impression, but I knew that I could come back to it, as indeed I am. It appears in an entry datelined Christmas Eve.

The holiday season reminds me about the prevailing worldview of most of my counterparts in non-heterosexual New York, and maybe even for me: the purpose of life is to collect as many fun experiences as possible, before death.  I realize that this is a bit of an exaggeration, but, for most people I know, it’s more or less the case.  The person who dies having played with the most toys wins!  Of course, people with children have a different orientation: the purpose of life is to do everything possible to ensure a good life for the children.  People with children are generally willing to make great sacrifices for them, although I think that the kind of good life they are trying to ensure for their children is more-or-less the same thing: a collection of fun experiences.

I’ve had these thoughts myself, often, but never all at once, and never with Eric Patton’s concision. My entire worldly ambition has been to avoid living a life that could be described as “a collection of fun experiences.” But I have nothing particularly sharp to say about the alternatives. There’s the “meaningful life,” of course; but the meaningful life, by definition, requires a more or less clear sense of meaning, whether religious or secular. The older I get, the more wilful and imaginary such meanings come to seem.

Whether or not Eric intended it, I read into “a collection of fun experiences” the implication that the person accumulating the fun belongs to a community that validates it. Even if the community is vanishingly small. I know, for example, that Eric and I enjoy foreign languages, and that we find it “fun” (for want to an excuse to look for a better word) to spend hours with grammars and lexicons.( Or would if we had the hours to spare.) Most of my friends, certainly, do not share this interest, and I suspect that the same is true for Eric — but we can form a community of two, if need be; so that when Eric wishes me “Happy Birthday, Grandpa” in Nederlands, it’s definitely a fun experience for me. At the right time, such a gesture can altogether make my day. But just because it’s less expensive and more educational than a week on the Riviera doesn’t make it more important or even, necessarily, more personal.

In other words, I try not to kid myself about the quality of my entertainments. I do flatter myself that they are more entertaining to me, though. I have given pleasure a great deal of close attention — it’s in my nature to bestow close attention on anything that I don’t simply ignore — and I have never had much of a problem resisting the pleasures of others. The Internet, moreover, has made it possible to expect to find other people whose ideas about pleasure have roughly the same contours as mine. As a result of all this, I don’t wonder if I’m missing out on something, and I’m not beset by the nagging fear that “this is all that there is.” Although I get tired quite easily, the world itself grows more inexhaustible every day.

I’m almost certain — I haven’t been thinking about it for very long — that the part ef each of that dies and deconposes and quits the earth (whether for another destination or not) is the least important part of us. To the extent that we’re remembered with a smile, our collections of fun experiences don’t dwindle to ash, whatever they may have been. 

¶ A bizarre, up-tempo advertisement for Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark. (Maud Newton)

¶ Daniel Menaker interviews himself — a conversation? (The Second Pass)

¶ Jonathan Harris, co-editor of We Feel Fine. A picture a day, and often an interesting text entry as well. (via Mnémoglyphes)

In the din of chit-chat and prognostication about digital book readers and whatnot, the idea of the library seems to have been drowned out. Technically, of course, the library will go digital along with its constituent texts, and occupy no visible space. A superb prospect! If someone offered me the contents of several major research libraries on a handful of flash drives, I’d be as giddy as a schoolboy.

The idea of the book as a disembodied object that appears only when needed is tremendously appealing. It would be wonderful if my bodied books would appear when needed! The other night, it’s true, I got very lucky: when the conversation turned to Savonarola, I was able to produce Lauro Martines’s book on the subject, Fire in the City. More typical, sadly, was the search for Marsha Colish’s Medieval Foundations of the Western Intellectual Tradition. The Readerware file — I was still using Readerware at the time — pointed me to a shelf that did not exist. I tore apart the history bookcase, but to no avail. It turned out that I had let M le Neveu borrow the book, and surrendered to the nutty idea that a nonexistent shelf would indicate that the book was out on loan. It was thanks only to a spot of housecleaning at his end that I put my hands on Professor Colish.

A new way of cataloguing my library occurred to me the other day: I would simply take snapshots of the ranges of books. Most of my shelves hold two rows of books, one behind the other; the block of shelves in the photo above holds three. Hence “tearing apart.” A loose-leaf notebook full of digital images of arrayed spines would be the only catalogue that I’d need, and it would take very little time to update. If I were younger, I’d probably give this notion a try, but my more experienced self thinks that it’s suspiciously easy-sounding. I don’t know what’s wrong with the idea, really, but I’m sure that there’s something — and I know that I would feel an everloving fool when I found out what it was.

The other day, Joe Jervis remarked in passing that he has never been one to amass books in order to show off his reading. Horrified, I wondered if (a) that’s what my library is all about and (b) that’s how my library strikes other people. The first doubt was easily dealt with, because I’m very unimpressed by my library, and would not think much of anyone who regarded it as extensive. For me, an impressive library is a room all four walls of which are lined with bookshelves that reach at least from hip height to the ceiling. As for what other people think, I had to admit that I’m showing off. Subject, however, to the foregoing caveat: only rubes fall for it. This is simply how the well-fed urban ego behaves.

As I toiled over piles of books this afternoon, I asked myself more than once: why do I have all these books? If it weren’t for periodic bouts of re-shelving, would I ever have occasion to touch them? It’s all very well to produce a book about Savonarola on demand, but it’s also true that nobody dropped out of the dinner-party conversation in order to read it. You could say that I demonstrated the book’s existence. As I could with somewhere between two and three thousand other volumes. Pourquoi?

I have never lived without books, but I suspect that, without the daily reminder posted by those serried dust jackets, I might forget an important part of myself — to wit, where I’ve been in this life. I’ve spent so much of it reading!

Fossil Darling, who likes to dream, promised me the other day that, if and when he wins the lottery, he will set me up in a loft vast enough to house all of my books. Quatorze frowned: “RJ doesn’t want to live in a loft.” Quite right, Q! If money were no object, I’d take a suite at one of the grand hotels and survive on room service. With room service, I wouldn’t need a library. I’d just have books sent up.

As needed.

What a difference a day makes &c. I was practically a W-O-M-A-N today. (Sing it, Maria!) And yet it wasn’t that I got so much done as that I attended to so many different things, one of which was finishing The Kiss Murder, Mehmet Murat Somer’s “detective novel” starring an Audrey-Hepburn-like drag queen who’s also a gifted kick-boxer, a veritable Jackie Chan in YSL. In Istanbul, did I mention.

PLUS! PLUS! PLUS! I fixed the dishwasher. Me, moi! All by myself.

Okay, no plumbing was involved. What had happened — a fit of pique. The sort of thing that happens only when I’m really too tired to be in the kitchen. Sure, I’d floated through the evening on a sea of Sancerre and Champagne, but intoxication was not the culprit. I wasn’t so much a drunk as an overtired three year-old. If you’ve been around an overtired three year-old lately, you know that it is easier to plug a volcano with your index finger than to quiet a toddler who has gotten stuck in the phase change between wakefulness and sleep. (Cue the streaky Star Trek effects!) That was me on Wednesday night. I gave the middle rack of the dishwasher a yank. No doubt I meant to punish it by forcibly evicting it from the dishwasher. In this I was successful. How to put it back, though….

Only when all the dishes and whatnot of the not-a-birthday party had been washed (on the bottom rack; the dishwasher continued to work just fine, at half capacity) did I figure out how to fix the thing. As you can imagine, what was missing after the defenestration was whatever it was that kept the middle rack from rolling on indefinitely, right off the retractable rails. What in model railroading was called a “buffer” — the things at the end of the track at Washington’s Union Station that will keep a locomotive from ploughing into the passengers. I new that I was missing the dishwasher’s objective correlative of these stoppers, but I had no idea what it looked like. Until I chanced to see the upper rack, the very shallow shelf for silver (this is a Miele we’re talking about; none of those ground-floor silverware baskets here!). At the end of each retractable rail, there was a little plastic plug. Aha! I was looking for two items. What did they look like? And — in a miracle of modern cognition — no sooner did I realize that I was looking for two plastic plugs (as opposed to the band of aluminum that I’d imagined) than they both appeared! Unbroken! Plugged into place, they did their job, although the trauma of ejection had weakened the grip of the join on the right. So I fastened both plugs with twist-ties.

Wasn’t that fascinating?

Having shared all of this wonderful news, I find that I have no energy at all for a discussion of Los Abrazos Rotos, the new Almodóvar film. I saw it late this afternoon — something else that I did today that wasn’t exactly taxing. All I’ll say now is that Penélope Cruz has never been more ravishing. Her brilliant smile eats up the screen with the gusto of Audrey Hepburn — or Katharine, if you prefer.

Kathleen will be leaving for Florida in the morning, even though the weather there is supposed to be worse for Florida than what we’re going to have is for New York. I’ve sent her off with a last supper of some of my best dishes: tomato soup, grilled lamb chops, steamed baby asparagus and roast new potatoes. A Hepburn sort 0f menu, when you think about it.

¶ Jiří Å alamoun’s Basic Phrenology.

¶ It never hurts to ask. (And whatever happened to Carolyn Weatherhogg later on?)

¶ Stonehenge-under-High.

¶ How long before Bill Cunningham snaps this in titanium on a fashionista at his favorite corner of town?

Last night, I very nearly brought the holidays to a train-wreck finale. Realizing that I was running out of steam, I pressed ahead with the production of a demoralizingly sub- par dinner for six. Then, instead of sensibly retiring when Kathleen and Fossil Darling left the table — Kathleen to work in the bedroom, Fossil to get to bed on a school night — I vivaciously engaged in a provocative conversation with M le Neveu about Roman Polanski. Kathleen had to break it up, it was so provocative. Then I broke the dishwasher.

Worst of all, I awoke feeling flu-ish. I was on the edge and I wished to stop there. So we did the decent thing and canceled this evening’s dinner reservation at La Grenouille first thing.

There was a bit of misapprehension among the dinner guests: it was thought that I was giving myself a birthday dinner. This made a lot of sense, since I was giving a dinner and it was my birthday. But this was a coincidence. M le Neveu was in town, and Wednesday night was the only time that we could all get together. On top of the coincidence, I piled some rather unwise decisions about the menu (see below) — startlingly unwise decisions, in retrospect. Keep-this-man-out-of-the-kitchen unwise. I can reconstruct “what I was thinking,” but I can’t justify it without recourse to the very fatigue that sapped most pleasure and a good deal of flavor from the event, at least for me, after everyone had left, and I couldn’t figure out what I’d done to the dishwasher.

At least I didn’t sit up berating myself for having failed at life &c. Well, all right, I did berate myself a bit. But I was too tired to keep it up for very long.

I did stay in bed all day today, dozing, or sat in my reading chair. No music, nor even a mug of tea (until just now). Just a lot of ice water and the occasional snack. I read two books, Lauren Grodstein’s A Friend of the Family and Lynn Barber’s An Education. Both are super books. I cleaned up a bit of last night’s debris. Eventually, I made the bed. Gradually, the morning’s mood of complicated, anguished fatigue shaded into plain fatigue.

I have been writing a lot about fatigue in the past few months (so it seems; I may have been at it far longer), and I’m beginning to find the topic boring. I know why I write about it: I keep hoping that I’ll find some way around it, some brilliant plan for the conservation of energy. But even if I do, it’s not going to be through meditations here.

¶ Memoirs of a Cracked Cook

What I was thinking: last Wednesday, I bought a whole tenderloin at Agata & Valentina. I like to have one in the freezer because it’s so easy to slice off pieces thick or thin for various dishes — Filet with blue cheese, for example. I thought — this was the first mistake — that Beef Stroganoff would make an elegant New Year’s Eve supper for the two of us. As indeed it would have done. But I haven’t made frites in a while (certainly not in the kitchen itself; the friteuse spent the warm months out on the balcony), and Stroganoff, easy-sounding at four days’ remove, became rather daunting up close. In any case, the mood of this holiday season was, decidedly: take it easy. So we didn’t have much of anything special on New Year’s Eve. At some point, over the weekend, we had a supper of Sicilian salami, assorted cheeses, and the New Year’s Eve caviar, with a bottle of champagne. The tenderloin remained in the freezer, and my itch to make Stroganoff remained dangerously unrelieved.

Because I’m a dead-tired fool (there is no other explanation), I latched on to the notion that Beef Stroganoff would be the perfect entrée for the somewhat impromptu dinner party. The idiocy of this idea is only intensified by the fact that I’ve never made the dish for more than four people at a time. To do it properly for six (as I learned) would require at least two skillets, side by side; no single pan would ever be large enough to brown the meat properly. So there was that.

Then the friteuse acted up. Or, rather, it turned out that I still don’t know how to use it. It’s the third DeLonghi deep-fryer that I’ve owned, and my least favorite by far. It has an elaborate time-and-temperature setting protocol that is, let’s just say, inflexible.

And did I mention dinner rolls? I’ve been wanting to make dinner rolls for ages, and last night I did. But I started them a bit too early in the afternoon. Something that has never happened before happened: the second rising was so prolonged that the carefully weighed and shaped balls of dough coalesced into an enormous blob.

I will spare you the Caesar frolics. But I’ll note that all the salad plates were clean. 

Golly, isn’t it still somebody else’s birthday?

I was awfully down in the dumps this afternoon, but two things happened. First, I bought Lauren Grodstein’s A Friend of the Family. On the basis of Joanna Smith Rakoff’s review in the Book Review (last week’s), I expected the novel to re-ignite my flagging interest in fiction. And that is exactly what it has done. I’m writing this in the wee smalls because I haven’t been able to put the book down.

The other thing that happened was the realization that, when I’m tired, I feel sorry not so much for myself as for my wounded vanity. It’s as though my vanity were a pet in distress — and I can’t think how I’ll keep the poor beast alive. A lifetime’s flirtations with suicide (and I do mean flirtations) suddenly made sense. I snapped out of my sulk.

I snapped out my sulk despite the following chronicle-of-a-death-foretold bit from the novel that is re-igniting my interest in fiction even as it persuades me that “re-ignition” is a short-term concept. (The narrator of A Friend of the Family is an internist practicing medicine in a fictionalized Tenafly, across the river.)

You are who you are at fifty-three, and even if the person you are is lucky and happy, the crush of it — the kneecapping crush of it — is that anyway it’s too late. My fifty-three-year-old overweight diabetics would die of stroke in fifteen years; my fifty-three-year-old hypersensitive, sedentary middle managers would die of kidney failure. They would not lose weight, they would not start to exercise, they might not even remember to take their meds. They were fifty-three; they were who they were. And as so many doctors before me have noted, it’s often easier to die than to change.

And if the effing doctors would only bestir themselves to make emergency rooms less ghastly, it might be pleasant as well as easy. 

Happy birthday from Who I Am.

¶ George Washington gets the Maira Kalman treatment. Happy!

¶ The Gainsborough girls, and other painted sisters.

¶ Trading places: what if the Fed and the TSA switched places? (via Felix Salmon)

¶ Nowhere Boy trailer. (Scroll down)

This afternoon, I was reading the new issue of the London Review of Books, saving Alan Bennett’s Diary for later. Too lazy to get up, I turned the pages and settled on Anne Enright’s postcard from Recession Ireland, “Sinking by Inches.”

In the middle of 2007 a Romanian taxi driver told me he was going home to Bucharest because ‘the building site is dead.’ All his friends had already gone. He had a wife with a new baby (called Seán, as I remember), and this was why he would be the last to leave. I don’t know why nobody listened to this guy, or how we failed to understand what he was saying. In May 2007, the pre-election rhetoric dealt with worries about the economy, and each party, very helpfully, promised an increase in public spending. By summer the property market had sighed to a halt, a fact no one wanted to notice. A year later, Lehman Brothers fell, and this was so clearly not Ireland’s fault that the brief opportunity to talk about what was actually our fault was lost. I can understand the denial at the end of the boom; what worries me is the denial that made it. From 2001 to 2007 it was not possible to be off-message about the Irish economy or, especially, about the housing market. You would barely be published. Your article would end up in the middle of the supplement, unflagged.

As the publisher of a Web log that few people read, I didn’t have that problem. By the time The Daily Blague was even launched, I’d been posting “Friday Fronts” at Portico, many of which expressed discomfort with the financial laissez-faire that would lead to the Big Bust of 2008. I was reading well-publicized writers such as Paul Krugman and nodding my head, really. Kathleen and I had groaned heavily about the repeal of Glass-Steagall, in 1998; we thought that Sandy Weill was building a house of cards.

And we were right. But what’s the use of that? What good did it do Paul Krugman? Of course his reputation was burnished by the fall of Bear Stearns, and the fall of Lehman Brothers, and the near-collapse of AIG. Fine. I’m sure that he’d have preferred effectiveness to glory. If the people controlling the levers of power had listened to him, then —

Instead, against all the odds that  common sense could call, Lawrence Summers and his satellites (Rubin, Geithner, and Bernanke) shine brightly in White House thinking. One wishes that Jacques Necker could rise from his grave and deliver a second compte rendu.

Perhaps you know what I mean by that. I have no idea whether most readers of this site can be expected to know about Jacques Necker and his Compte rendu au roi. (Thank heaven for Wikipedia in this regard! It spares me a lot of clunky and, in the event, unnecessary exposition.) And I’m not sure that a second accounting would be any more helpful than the first one was. The smart folks in 1780s France simply weren’t ready to hear what Necker had to say. Ditto Wall Street in the past decade — even in the flotsammy wake of Enron.

Sadly, I haven’t got any brilliant insights to trumpet. If anything, the Noughts taught me how dangerous the 20-80 curve is now that the Internet allows everyone to see it. You want to be where the action is, right? You want to be excited by the guy with the mike — and why not? There’s an app for that, and it has been processing the messy organic-chemistry equivalents of bits and bytes in our older brain structures for far longer than we’ve been human. The Noughts taught me that environmental catastrophe, awful and likely as it is, has nothing on the engines of brilliant stupidity that every day confute the ancients’ belief in our nature as rational animals.

My resolution for this the first year of my infant grandson’s life: Think twice about being cool. Keep on thinking.

¶ Chuck Close gets the Chuck Close treatment (scroll down). (via  reddit)

¶ The 2009 Darwin Awards.

Somewhere between Labor Day and Thanksgiving, I realized that I was using the microwave oven for three things: reheating mugs of tea, scalding milk for béchamel, and I forget the third thing. This realization came at about the same time as my decision to stop zapping tea. There’s nothing wrong with reheating tea in a microwave, I suppose; but (long story short) I was tired of having to turn off the dishwasher every time I refilled my mug. Since the dishwasher is almost always on (its cycle can run for as long as two hours), and I am almost always refilling my mug — and because it wasn’t exactly unusual for me to forget to turn the dishwasher back on — you can see how the conflict got to be tiresome.

I bought a stainless steel kettle at Feldman’s and kept it on a flame tamer over the stove’s lowest setting. (Now I pour steeped tea directly into it, without troubling a fréquentable teapot.) As for the milk-scalding, I also bought, and also at Feldman’s, a stainless steel pan that is really an overgrown measuring cup. It holds a pint, but although it is honest it is not substantial: scalding milk is what it seems to have been designed to do.

Now that I didn’t need the microwave oven for anything (except that third thing, which I couldn’t remember), I woke up to the fact that there are toaster ovens so big that they are not toaster ovens anymore, but real ovens. And I really needed a second conventional oven. I was probably never going to have a second wall-mounted oven in this kitchen, but now I saw my way around that. 

Why doI need a second oven? To serve dinner rolls alongside a roast chicken. To serve a savory soufflé before a roast chicken. To bake frozen croissants for breakfast, at 350º, while cooking bacon in the best of all possible ways, in a 400º oven. The list is not endless, or even particularly long, but if I was tired of forgetting to turn the dishwasher back on after reheating a mug of tea, I was a hundred times more tired of not being able to plan certain menus because I had only one oven.

Early in life, I was told that gas ovens (such as the one built into my kitchen wall) are best for roasting meat, and that electric ovens are preferred for baking breads and cakes. Whether this is true or not, I think it’s true. Even so, I’ll probably continue to bake banana bread in the gas oven. It’s cheaper, for one thing; we pay for electricity but not for gas. And even if we paid for gas, it would probably still be cheaper. But after I’d replaced the microwave with the unit shown above, yesterday afternoon, a loaf of banana bread seemed to be the perfect choice for a shakedown cruise. Truth to tell, I was quite a bit more surprised that the oven worked, and that the banana bread tasted as good as it did, than I was that my grandson was born with all his fingers and toes &c the day before. Thjs may be because I was far more directly involved with the installation of the new oven.

The microwave oven turned out to be a never-entirely-satisfactory convenience. Like many cooks of my vintage, I gave Barbara Kafka’s Microwave Gourmet a college try, going so far as to buy one of those peculiar porcelain platters with metal studs that were supposed to facilitate the browning of meat (wasn’t that what they were for?). For six months or so, I had a crush on the idea of baking potatoes in eleven minutes. Most seriously, I made extensive use, over several years, of Bread in Half the Time.

But now that I don’t spend so much time in the kitchen, I’m less interested in saving time when I do. The mircrowave oven may be an appliance with a great future, but for the moment I’m going to store it in the past, to be pulled out now and then only for the odd comparison to Twitter, which sometimes seems also to be an appliance that I can’t find a place for.

I would never have gotten rid of the microwave oven just for the sake of it. But I’m pleased by the residual buzz of having disposed of the object of Julia Child’s sweetly disingenuous dismissal:

Microwaving. I wouldn’t be without my microwave oven, but I rarely use it for real cooking. I like having complete control over my food — I want to turn it, smell it, poke it, stir it about, and hover over its every state. Although the microwave does not let me participate fully, I do love it for rewarming, defrosting, and sometimes for starting up or finishing off. However, I know how popular microwave ovens have become and that many people adore them. I’m delighted to see, therefore, a growing number of excellent books on the subject available in supermarkets and bookstores.

The third thing was nachos. Which I need like a hole in the head. Something tells me that the new oven is going to make much better ones.

At the beginning of last week, I decided that two weeks’ vacation was not enough, so I went back and changed an entry that nobody is ever going to look at again (the Daily Office for 18 December), and changed “4” into “11.”

There have been moments when a years’ vacation seemed not too much. So much was left behind last year as I came to grips with the roaring torrent of feeds that floods my Google Reader page as quickly as I can scan them. I do hope to write more about reading in 2010 — and to read more to write about. Nevertheless, barring the unforeseen, the Daily Office will reappear on the 11th.

Portrait of The Editor holding his grandson, William Aidan O’Neill, born earlier today. During a blue moon!

It has been years and years since I last held a newborn child, and my arms — so much of them, so little of Will — needed a bit of re-adjustment, provided by his mother. Once properly arranged, we stood for twenty minutes or more, while Megan and Kathleen chatted. I worried a little bit about crushing him, but what really terrified me was the possibility that he might suddenly stop breathing. (Then he would twist a part of himself, and I’d breathe.)

According to Kathleen, Will does not look like a newborn. I don’t think he does, either. But he can squinch up his face in that wizened, little-old-gnome way, reminding us that there is nothing generic about him: he’s his own man already. (It isn’t the blanket that’s covering his face, below. Those are his sleeves.)

About becoming a grandfather, I can say only that it feels utterly normal: attending to this boy (and to any siblings who come along) is evidently something that I have been waiting to do all my life. In completing my adulthood, it concludes my adolescence. May Will make better use of youth than I did; and may I make as good a greybeard as my health and talent allow.

My favorite taken-by-me photograph of 2009. Happy New Year, you guys!