This Fourth of July, I spent the day reading. All of it. I did not watch the fireworks; I did not leave the apartment. I scarcely left my reading chair.

The book in question — for it was one book — was Wilkie Collins’s No Name, a novel that I’d never heard of when Kathleen found it on the shelves at the London Review Bookshop in May. She read it in one go, mostly on the plane coming home, absolutely unwilling to put it down. It took the book longer to hook med; the First Scene’s idyll cum catastrophe seemed to involve a lot of  stuffy Victorian attitudinizing. But once Magdalen made her escape, and the story got rolling, it carried me along as gleefully as any amusement-park ride.

For sheer fun, the Fourth Scene can’t be beat. Set at Aldborough (Aldeburgh) on the Suffolk coast, it is a high-pitched match — liken it to tennis or to chess as you will — between two wily plotters whose schemes are so fast and furious that they often blow up, or fall completely flat, with the sardonic levity of Mad Magazine’s “Spy vs Spy” feature. Collins is of course the arch-plotter himself, and his shamelessness is exceeded only by his plausibility. You could argue that a novel as entertaining as No Name can’t be a very great one, but I’m not interested in that kind of talk right now. I believe that anyone my age ought to have read a novel three times before getting carried away by greatness.

And in any case what interests me most about the book, quite aside from the fun of it, is its ending, and what I like about the ending may be proof, to some readers, that No Name is not even a very good novel, much less a great one. I’m not sure that I’d have grasped why I found the ending so satisfying if it hadn’t been for editor Mark Ford’s introductory remarks.

Many, however, have found No Name‘s last chapters unsatisfactory. That Magdalen’s brave odyssey should collapse into such a morass of clichés — rescue by a seafaring strong man, a penitential illness and a sickbed conversion — seems a frustrating elision of the many powerful questions the novel has hitherto posed, though to such as Mrs Olyphant, even this dramatic reversion to the ideals of hearth and home was too little too late.

Were we reading the same book? What “deathbed conversion”? I missed that. Nor did I see Magdalen’s illness as “penitential.” But the “rescue by a seafaring strong man,” now, that didn’t strike me as a cliché at all. D’you know why? From the moment that Captain Kirke made his brief appearance in the middle of the novel, I knew that Magdalen was going to end up in his arms, or at least that’s where I wanted her to end up, because without being entirely conscious of what I was going on I did something that lawyers call “incorporation by reference.” Captain Kirke was a reference, whether Collins intended him to be or not, to Jane Austen’s Captain Wentworth, and when things did indeed work out as I’d hoped, the last thirty-odd pages were charged with all the power of Persuasion, an effect greatly intensified by the fact that I hadn’t just read Persuasion.

Let me be very, very clear about one thing: I have no idea of Collins’s influences. I don’t know that he ever read Persuasion. I’m fairly certain that any reminiscence is unintentional; that, in fact, Collins would have cloyed the ending if he had undertaken it as an homage to Austen’s last novel. The simple truth is that both novelists fastened on a type of English hero that, while not overly common, is instantly recognizable. Collins describes the type very well, seeing him through Magdalen’s eyes and thus capturing the particular flavor of the hero-worship:

She sat listening to him with a breathless interest, looking at him with a breathless wonder, as those fearful stories — made doubly vivid by the simple language in which he told them — fell, one by one, from his lips. His noble unconsciousness of his own heroism — the artless modesty with which he described his own acts of dauntless endurance and devoted courage, without an idea that they were anything more than plain acts of duty to which he was bound by the vocation that he followed — raised him to a place in her estimation so high above her, that she became uneasy and impatient until she had pulled down the idol again, which she herself had set up. It was on these occasions that she rigidly exacted from him all those little familiar attentions so precious to women in their intercourse with me.

You can’t imagine Anne Elliot exacting attentions from Captain Wentworth, but then Anne is like Magdalen’s sister, Norah — patient. Magdalen has, in the course of the novel, exhibited plenty of “dauntless endurance” herself, and plenty of courage as well. She deserves more than a happy ending; she deserves an apotheosis, and that’s what she gets in Captain Kirke. An apotheosis is nothing but a cliché seen in an unflattering light by someone in an ungenerous mood.  

***

An even guiltier pleasure is imagining what Anthony Trollope would have made of No Name. Thrown it into the fire, he would have. Magdalen Vanstone, insofar as she is the heroine of a novel who finds happiness in the end, stands as a repudiation of everything that Trollope believed about young ladies. The catechism is set forth in The Small House at Allington, in which Lily Dale plights her troth to an unworthy cad, Adolphus Crosbie, and thereafter refuses to acknowledge that Crosbie’s withdrawal from her life permits her to entertain the affections of the worthy man who really loves her, Johnny Eames. Readers begged Trollope to bring Lily and Johnny together in a later book, but he steadfastly refused to do so, because his belief that a good woman can love only once was an article of personal religion. It was also an article of his artistic practise, and that’s why I had to stop reading Trollope: he was prescribing his romances, not describing them.

When Magdalen Vanstone falls in love with Frank Clare, it’s puzzling, because Magdalen is such a strong girl and Frank is such a wuss. You wonder: is Magdalen going to be the making of this young man? Even if you’re clever, like me, and foresee that Frank’s path will cross Captain Kirke’s (how could they not? they’re both in China; and, yes, that’s a joke of sorts), you don’t know what Collins is going to do with Frank when it comes time to tie up all the knots. In any case, Magdalen outgrows the boy. He behaves badly and she gets over it. Frank’s father writes, at the end, to tell her what has become of his son. “The time when it could have distressed her, was gone by; the scales had long since fallen from her eyes.” Scales don’t exist, somehow, for Trollope, and this makes his love stories awkward, because nobody can ever grow up.

No Trollopean heroine would ever dream of embarking on Magdalen’s vengeful adventure, either. Trollope must have hated the very success of Magdalen’s bold impersonations. Nor could he have believed in rehabilitation for a swindler like Captain Wragge. It is impossible not to imagine Trollope waxing mighty indignant. Presenting a minx and a scoundrel in a warm, favoring light: how awfully immoral he must have found it!

He probably had the sense not to read it.  

***

The question raised by my positive feelings about the ending of No Name is this: what kind of literary criticism am I practising when I “incorporate by reference” the whole of one novel into the body of another, giving the second a kind of experiential credit? By insisting that No Name gave me great pleasure because I was singularly well-reminded of Persuasion? Does my report have any value? Or is it the unhelpful equivalent of saying, “I really liked it!”

I believe that it does have value, that it is extremely important to be candid about the pleasures of fiction, howsoever they derive. I note that Captain Kirke reminded me of Captain Wentworth in a way that I would not see Captain Wentworth’s reminding me of Captain Kirke. Reading Persuasion, I might well be reminded of the example of Captain Kirke, as another “seafaring strong man.” But I would not say that Persuasion is like No Name. This connection runs one way only, and it ought to be clear that the point of my remarks is not, certainly not to propose an equivalence between the two novels. No Name is, one might argue, a lesser novel precisely because Persuasion can be read into it. Nothing can be read into Persuasion, or into any of Jane Austen, except perhaps shreds of Dr Johnson’s cadences. Jane Austen needs no help from me.

But if Wilkie Collins does, if he can use that help — if No Name becomes a more satisfying book if you’ve read (and loved) Persuasion — then I’m happy to give it. I’m happy to help myself, in short. No Name might not be a better novel, but it becomes a more engaging one because of what I bring to it. The matter interests me very much as a function of age. I read, as it were, ensconced on an ever-growing and now rather massive cloud of prior reading. There’s no telling or how it might adapt my reading posture, or what I might reach in and pull out of it.

The idea of evaluating a novel in isolation, judging how well it functions as a self-contained contraption, is by now vieux jeu. We read for pleasure, not for liturgical exercise. In the end, “I really liked it” must be the (unstated) premise of every critical response; “I didn’t like it” ought to warn the writer to stop right there, for nothing that follows will be of any serious interest (however rib-tickling the take-down). If you want to tell the world that you liked something, then you must be as fully honest as you can be, and admit to accidental attractions aong with the high-minded ones. In the case of No Name, I don’t see anything particularly accidental about my being reminded of Persuasion. It can be taken as understood that, at this point, I’ve read all of Jane Austen three or four times at least. (Just as it can be taken as understood that I’m unable to finish Moby-Dick.) And how keen the pleasure, in such a jolly book, to feel the warmth and generosity of a novel so much more austere.  

We’re having a heat wave — and Con Ed is having a lock-out. At least two managers, stepping in to do the rank-and-file work, have been hospitalized for burns. Our fretful neighbor down the hall gobbles on about the risk of being stuck in the elevator during a sudden blackout. “Because,” she goes on, as if to add something, “You don’t want to get stuck in the elevator during a blackout.”

The other day, she had a different kind of lock-out to worry about. Another neighbor’s grandson, not quite a year older than Will so therefore about three and a quarter, locked his mother out of his grandparents’ apartment when she went to the laundry room down the hall to put some clothes in the dryer.

I was coming back from tossing something down the garbage chute when I saw the mother at the door. I thought that she was letting herself in, and I didn’t think anything of asking after her father (our neighbor), who hasn’t been well. I wished that I knew her name; I’ve known her for most of her life. She was just about starting out in elementary school when we moved into this apartment. She and her older brother both married years ago, and they both have sons. The daughter now lives in Astoria, I believe, but she is a frequent visitor, and I always like to see her boy, who is very handsome. He has a Spanish grandmother, and a grandfather from Bombay, and his other grandparents are Japanese. I didn’t realize what he had just done — his mother was, alas, not letting herself in — until one of the building’s handymen swept by with an enormous ring of keys. That’s when our fretful neighbor appeared. ‘Oh, good, someone’s come up!” I myself remained fretful. The last time I locked myself out of the apartment, none of the keys on that ring turned our lock, and I can’t remember how I got back inside. It turned out to be just as fruitless for our neighbor’s daughter. I offered my own key, but it didn’t even  fit the lock on her door.

I wishdrew to our apartment but left the door ajar. I tried to work but could only think of the little boy, confused inside his grandparent’s apartment. Our neighbors’ apartment has a balcony, but it is in the outer corner of the building, and there is no adjacent balcony, so no one could do what one very agile flight attendant did, shortly after we moved into our place, when she locked herself out of the flat next door. Right: she climbed over the railing and stepped along the edge, with her back to the abyss. I wondered how difficult it would be to rappel or otherwise drop down to our neighbors’ balcony from the one above. These hopeless thoughts were obsessive and sickening, and I wasn’t getting any work done.

Then I heard the cheering and the laughter. It seems that the little boy settled down enough to do what his mother told him to do, and unlock the door. Universal applause! But I thought as I went back to work that in my day the child would have been scolded and possibly spanked, with all the love in the world. Parents put a lot more stock in fear in those days than they do now. I like to think that it is a change for the better, and I hope that it is not just pretty to think so.  

***

I spent the afternoon with Ms NOLA yesterday — summer hours! It was too hot to do anything interesting, but we decided that we would fix dinner together and that her beau (M le Beau) would join us, as of course would Kathleen. At first, we contemplated a composed salad, with tomatoes and some delicious piemontese rib eye that I would slice paper-thin. That probably would have made sesnse, given the heat, but we went in the other direction altogether, and prepared a basically Italian meal, with a primo of pasta and a secondo of roast chicken. We cheated on the chicken; we bought herb- and garlic-marinated chicken halves at Fairway. I gave them a try the other day and they weren’t at all bad. I could probably come up with a more interesting marinade myself, but you can’t marinate a chicken at the last minute; it takes hours (and hours). But Ms NOLA goosed it a bit, with cayenne and, at the end, green onions. This was served with sautéd corn tossed with chives.

The pasta sauce was the focus of our invention. The minute we got back from the store, I ran a Vidalia onion through the mandoline and drizzled the slices with olive oil. In the course of two hours, the onion caramlized beautifully and reduced from the bulk of a softball to three or four weightless tablespoons of intense allitude. (Correct me on that; I’m working from allium.) Meanwhile, we dumped a large can of crushed San Marziano tomatoes into a small Dutch oven and seasoned it with white wine and nutmeg; as it bubbled along nicely and slowly, we added more wine. When it was time to put the chicken in the oven, we also slid in a pint of cherry tomatoes, daubed with butter and marjoram, tossed in one of those lion’s-head bowls with a lid.

The sauce was a study in foods cooked for a long time playing well with others that were hardly cooked at all, and the result was a robust summer sauce that made the best of the weather instead of fighting it. While the water boiled for the spaghetti, we combined the slow-cooked elements in the Dutch oven, stirring in roast tomatoes (with their bubbly, buttery cooking liquid) and the caramelized onion into the crushed tomatoes. Then we added a grated zucchini and a lot of garlic. At the last minute, a quantity of chopped parsley was tipped in.  At the table, we passed a bowl of chopped basil, which Kathleen doesn’t care for, and a wedge of organic parmegiano reggiano, along with a grater.

Ms NOLA did almost all the work, seriously, especially the chopping and the grating. She decided when to add what (although she always asked for my opinion first, only to hear that I left it up to her). My one new idea (new to me, that is) — that the grated zucchini would boost the lightness of the sauce while practically melting invisibly into it — turned out to be a good one. The downside of my being spared all that hard, hot prep was that I sat down to table in wide-awake mode, and didn’t shut up the entire evening.

The next morning, I have washed all the dishes and gathered up the linens into the clothes hamper. The empty bottle of Médoc has been carried down to the recycling bin. Ms NOLA took all of the leftovers, at my urging, so there is nothing left of dinner, not even a slice of the scrumptious almond-and-apricot tart — nothing, that is, except the fantastic fragrance of a delicious sauce.

***

I may not have done anything interesting on Friday afternoon, but I did go to Crawford Doyle, which I would classify as disgraceful, given the pile of books, right here in the apartment, that remain to be read. I bought four books, two of of them criminal purchases — redeemed, however, by the curious and unlikely fact that I have read them both as of this writing. I have done nothing else this weekend, but I have read Midnight in Peking, by Paul French, and The Rules of Civility, by Amor Towles. I read the first on Saturday and the second on Sunday, boom boom.

The two justifiable purchases were After a Funeral, one of Diana Athill’s memoirs, and An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace, by Tamar Adler. I’m reading all of Athill, anything I can get my hands on, so I don’t need to excuse that acquisition. An Everlasting Meal has been making a strongly favorable impression upon Ms NOLA, and, having read the wonderful chapter on rice, I can see why; among many other attractions, it is not lost on me that Elizabeth David is one of Adler’s touchstones. In short, it was never going to be the case that these books would get stuck in a pile and make me feel guilty.

But the other two books — pigs in pokes, almost. I’d seen The Rules of Civility, but resisted it, for reasons that I’ll explain when I write it up. What decided me for it was Ms NOLA’s remarking that her mother read it and liked it. A redoubtable recommendation! As for Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China, I’m afraid that I must confess (although I’m brazenly unashamed) that the dust jacket sold me. I can’t at the moment actually read the credits, and applaud the designer; it’s too dark at the moment. But I’ll write it up, too. An immensely exciting read! Both books ought to be adapted for the screen right away!

These two purchases were indefensible because there was no good reason to be sure that I wouldn’t dislike the reading of these books, and give up on them after ten or fiftee pages. It’s bad enough to buy the books by Athill and Adler; I know theat I’ll read them, but where will I put them? In the event, helped, perhaps, by weather that made anything but reading, and reading of an escapist nature, simply horrid, I swallowed both books whole, like two delicious oysters. It felt shockingly wrong to stay planted in my chair, hour after hour, turning the pages — and yet you probably think that that’s how I spend every day! If only!

Interestingly, both stories are about ten years older than I am. Much of Midnight in Peking happens in 1937, and almost all of The Rules of Civility is set, in Manhattan, in 1938. I have always believed that ordinary modern women never looked better than they did in 1939; I only wish that I knew it for an experienced fact. The conviction certainly gave both books a patina of chic.

Two excerpts from the Fourth Scene of No Name, by Wilkie Collins (1862). First, Captain Wragge cons Mrs Lecount into being flattered by his scientific chatter:

Never had Captain Wragge burnt his adulterated incense on the flimsy altar of human vanity to better purpose than he was burning it now.

Of course, it doesn’t take long for Mrs Lecount to wise up.

Mrs Lecount accepted the proposal. She was perfectly well aware that her escort had lost himself on purpose; but that discover exercised no disturbing influence on the smooth amiability of her manner. Her day of reckoning with the captain had not come yet — she merely added the new item to her list, and availed herself of the camp-stool. Captain Wragge stretched himself in a romantic attitude at her feet; and the two determined enemies (grouped like two lovers in a picture) fell into as easy and pleasant a converesation, as if they had been friends of twenty years’ standing.

***

From E H Carr, What Is History?, first published in 1961 and, with regard to the the problem posed by all advertising, as fresh as tomorrow:

Professional advertisers and campaign managers are not primarily concerned with existing facts. They are interested in what the consumer or elector now believes or wants only in so far as this enters into the end-product, ie what the consumer or elector can by skilful handling be induced to believe or want. Moreover, their study of mass pscychology has shown them that the most rapid way to secure acceptance of their views is through an appeal to the irrational element in the make-up of the consumer and elector, so that the picture which confronts us is one in which an élite of professional industrialists or party leaders, through rational processes more highly developed than ever before, strains its ends by understanding and trading on the irrationalism of the masses. The appeal is not primarily to reason; it proceeds in the main by the method which Oscar Wilde described as “hitting below the intellect.” I have somewhat overdrawn the picture lest I should be accused of underestimating the danger. But it is broadly correct, and could easily be applied to other spheres. In ever society, more or less coercive measures are applied by ruling groups to organize and control mass opinion. This method seems worse than some because it constitutes an abuse of reason.

***

Diana Athill, Instead of a Letter (1962): on having some money in one’s pocket after winning a prize.

To me, therefore, five hundred pounds tax-free seemed wealth. I could go to Greece during the coming spring without worrying — I could even travel first-class! I could by a fitted carpet, and new curtains which I really liked, and there would still be money over. During that winter I felt rich, and because I felt it I gave an impression of being it. A little while earlier I had been looking at dresses in a large, smart shop, and when I had pointed to a pretty one and said “I’ll try that,” the girl serving me had answered in a tired voice: “It’s expensive. Why try on something you can’t afford?” In the same shop, wearing the same clothes, soon after I had paid my five hundred pounds into the bank, I was served with such civil alacrity that I could have ordered two grand pianos to be sent home on approval and they would have offered a third. Courteous men spent hours unrolling bolts of material for me, urging me to consider another, and yet another. A pattern for matching? Why, yes! And instead of the strip two inches wide which I was expecting, lengths big enough to make a bedspread were procured for me. For about a month I believe I could have furnished a whole house on credit, not because I was looking different, not because I could, in fact, afford it; simply because, for the first time in my life and for no very solid reason, I was feeling carefree about money. I learnt a great deal about the power of mood during that month.

***

From the third and final part of Colm Tóibín’s second novel, The Heather Blazing (1994), which is in part a bildungsroman about a son of Fianna Fáil.

He could not wait to tell Carmel what he had seen. He thought about when he would see her next as he took a few steps down, and then he realized, as a slow pain went through him, that she was dead, that he would not have a chance to tell her about the scene he had witnessed. This made him understand, more than ever, that he could not face her not being with him, that he had spent the time since she died avoiding the fact of her death. He went down to the sand and sat in the shade. The wind was still strong and blew sand at him. He thought about it: the interval just now when he had blieved that she was alive, that she was back in the house, in the garden maybe, or in the proch, reading the paper, or a novel, and he would come back from his walk or his swim and he would tell her the news. Mike has taken to sitting in the shell of his house, with its walls open to the four winds reading the paper. But, slowly, painfully, it sank in thatthere would be nobody when he went back to the house.

What I never got quite round to saying, the other day, was that I don’t have the time to watch things on television. I really don’t! My days are full. Rather than watch two people have an interesting conversation, I’d prefer to read a transcript; not only can I do that more quickly, but I remember the insights much more precisely. The effort of netting useful information from the wide televisual datastream is a distraction from actual understanding. Also, most of that data is not only irrelevant but tedious.

As for watching television to pass the time, this, I assure you, is a capacity that can be relinquished, and once you let it go, television becomes a maddeningly pesky irritant. It’s raison d’être is to attract attention, for whatever reason. Usually the reason is dubious. One of the great things about iPods and smartphones is that televisions in public waiting rooms are now on the way out. Now we can expect everyone, and not just readers, to come equipped with personalized (and silent) means of passing the time.

I love watching movies at home, but this is not watching television. This is slipping a DVD into a player and watching a self-contained work of cinematic art. I don’t have as much time for it as I’d like; I seem to have less time for it than I used to do. A movie, unlike a TED talk, can be inherently transporting. The movie is not a medium but an end in itself, and the thoughts that watching a good movie inspires are not like the thoughts that one carries away from an enlightening lecture.

So my objection to TED talks in particular and to audiovisual presentations of information generally is two-edged. First, they take too much time. Second — and this is what’s wrong with being transported by a slideshow — they convey an illusory mantle of expertise. The bad thing that you take from a satisfying lecture is the half-conscious sense that you now understand something that you didn’t before. But this is to beggar any meaningful conception of “understanding.” What you learn from a truly good lecture is that you understand very little. If you want to understand more, you’re going to have roll up your sleeves and make a lot of decisions: whom to ask for advice about what to research, how to find out about useful projects that might be able to use your help, or whether you ought to pursue an advanced degree. Chatting agreeably with friends afterward over a glass of wine does not constitute understanding.

Kathleen and I have only one political difference: “Just once,” Kathleen moans, “I’d like to vote for someone I really liked.” I, for my part, can’t imagine such a development — as a matter of principle, anyway. As a matter of fact, I’ve always liked Michael Bloomberg, as mayor. I don’t really care to know him, or any other elected official, any better than that. I believe in impersonal politics! Once, over at the Lexington Candy Shop, Rudolph Giuliani, then a district attorney, walked in to canvass  the joint, and I couldn’t bear him from that moment on. I would be horrified to learn that a friend (or, more likely, a friend’s child) was running for office.

Thinking about the transports into which TED talks propel enthusiastic audiences, I can only imagine the shudder with which the Founders would have responded to the discovery, not yet made in their time, that highly-educated men (and women) of property can be swayed by savvy political appearances. Would it have mitigated or intensified their horror to know that very few people are ever transported across party lines?

***

Whenever I try to think of ways to fix the United States, I always bump up against states, and the preposterous meaningless boundaries with respect to population. History advises me that no one is ever going to redraw those lines. Montana will always be a big emptiness in the middle of nowhere, with two votes in the Senate.

It occurred to me yesterday that we might tackle the problem from the other direction. Create six to ten superstates, each centered on a major metropolitcan area, and give each one a clutch of extra senators. Work out the details and put the proposal into one tidy Constitutional Amendment. See how it goes. Most Americans would see their voting power shoot up, and swing states would be a thing of the past. Along with a lot of other headaches.

Happy Fourth!

The first thing that I read when I got this week’s New Yorker up to the apartment was  Nathan Heller’s “Listen and Learn,” a report on TED. If you don’t know what TED is, I am not going to help you. (Not here. If I ever make more considered use of this entry’s material, I will at least throw in a link.) It just seems that explaining TED in a blog entry, at this moment in time, is much like reminding you to turn on your computer. 

I haven’t watched much in the way of TED talks, partly because the ones that I did see were powerful contributors to my decision to resist all visual aids in the development of my fach. Aside from the photographs that decorate this site, and that have nothing to do with the written contents, perhaps even offering a haven of carefree purposelessness from the sea of memory and interrogation that pours out of me — aside from them, nothing. I’m like The New Yorker itself in the old days: no photographs and few drawings (aside, of course, from the “drawings”). That’s because I believe that visual display is profoundly distracting from the enterprise of sharing and parsing ideas. To grasp an idea, you must close your eyes — close your eyes, that is, in the act commonly known as “reading.” You must, in the course of bringing words to life in your brain, imagine an environment other than the one in which you’re reading. Sometimes it’s fun; often it’s hard work. There is reason to believe that there is a correlation between hard work and real learning. Learning is put to the test by doing. Where ideas are considered, writing is doing. As you’re no doubt aware, writing is even harder work than serious reading.

Watching someone tell an interesting story (which can be about anything in the world) is never going to be hard work. There is only one thing to learn from a TED talk: that you did or did not enjoy yourself while it lasted. As with sex, learning is slightly beside the point.

***

Heller is brilliant about TED.

The TED talk is today a sentimental form. Once, searching for transport, people might have read Charles Dickens, rushed the dance floor, watched the Oscars, biked Mount Tamalpais, put on Rachmaninoff, put on the Smiths, played Frisbee, poured wine until someone started reciting “somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond.” Now there is TED.

Transport. Yes. No thanks.

***

My disaffection with TED talks began long before I ever saw one, back in the mid-early days of The New Yorker Festival. Over three years, I attended ever more events, beginning with one and ending with six. Most of the events were literary in nature — or were billed as such. The first that I attended was a reading Edward T Jones (and was Jonathan Lethem there, too? I don’t remember.) At the last one, John Ashbery read some of his poems. It was at the New York Public Library, shortly before the Ashbery reading, that I came to the end of my Festival line. The hall was packed — not that this was a discomfort — and someone was interviewing Calvin Trillin, who of course was making the audience laugh a lot. (I remember a string of jokes about the “wily and parsimonious Victor Navasky,” then the publisher of The Nation.) Something about the laughter began to put me off. I was as entertained as anyone, but was the search for entertainment what had gotten me out of the house early on a weekend morning? Did I regard Calvin Trillin as an entertainer? No, as it happens, I didn’t, and I don’t. He is a writer — a very amusing one, certainly — whose presence adds little to the zing of his written words.

If I am going to see Calvin Trillin, then I want to meet Calvin Trillin, to sit down and talk with him. I realized two things at the Library. First, much as I enjoyed Trillin’s writing, I did not feel an urge to know him better. Jonathan Franzen — now there’s someone I’d like to talk to. I think. I have always wanted to have a conversation with Sigourney Weaver — about her father, perhaps the most deeply disappointed man in the history of television. (That is my inference, at least. I’d like to hear what she thinks, and what she saw growing up.) I did once have a sensationally fun conversation with Kate Christensen; I was able to tell her that I’d read all her books because my daughter and her first editor were college chums. In the aftermath of Netherland, I’m afraid that Joseph O’Neill might have come to fear that I was stalking him, but he very graciously granted my eccentric request for a signature on page 135 of my copy of his novel. And I cannot deny that bandying a word or two with Colm Tóibín has colored my reading of his work; it most certainly has done, and I’m grateful. I no New Critic, determined to reject any and all information about an artist extrinsic to the artwork itself. Heavens, no! But in each of the foregoing instances (all of them retailed pretty much the next morning, long ago in these pages), there was a personal encounter in which the writer, however forgettably, met me. The exchange was two-way, and we are the only two people who had it. The twinkle of that kind of memory was entirely absent from the experience of watching Calvin Trillin be witty.

***

I completely agree with Sir Ken Robinson’s views on public education. “I think you’d have to conclude that the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors.” Education, as it’s dished out today, almost anywhere, is wasted upon most of its reluctant recipients, and the university professors aren’t going to notice or care. Functionally, public education amounts to little more than day care for older children. A school that provides more than day care, and provides it consistently even to a quarter of its students, is a marvel. I may look up Sir Ken; I’ll certainly look out for signs of his impact on public education. But I am not going to look at his TED talk, which Heller says is “the most-viewed TED talk of all time.” I’m not in need of transport.

***

It appears (see yesterday’s entry) that I am not going the way of Nora Ephron, whatever the state of my platelets. Not yet. I’m slightly abashed about having brought the visit up at all, and I’ll try not to say anything about next week’s (routine) colonoscopy.

Later this morning, I’m due at the doctor’s, to have blood taken. The blood that was taken when I had the infusion of Remicade two weeks ago showed an abnormally low (but just abnormal) platelet count, which could mean, as the rheumatologist put it on the phone, “nothing,” or it could, I surmise, mean that I’m going the way of Nora Ephron. Life is so exciting!

I wonder if anyone one finds it strange that I have not mentioned the Affordable Care Act in these pages, not once, I believe. I am certainly not opposed to its provisions, and I was as pleasantly surprised as anyone by Chief Justice Roberts’s unexpected support for the Act as a tax. But ever since “health care” was very prematurely rushed into Congress for its peculiar brand of intensive care, in the early days of Bill Clinton, it has been so clear to me that charging for health care properly must precede paying for it that I can take no interest in the schemes that have been unrolled over the ensuing two decades. They’re all definitively stupid, in that they attempt to bandage bruises from the knockings of a congeries of medical practices that was never designed to work smoothly or consistently for a large number of patients. On the contrary, it was designed, to the extent that it was designed at all, to provide the executives of large corporations with free health care: a classic example of American socialism for the rich.

But no one seems at all interested in the history of our medical plant. How did it become what it is? I don’t think that arrangements for the equitable payment of doctors’ and hospitals’ bills can be made by people who have never given that question much thought.

The other day, the Times published a recipe for potato salad that caught my eye, David Tanis’s “A Summer Salad the French Might Recognize,” and I thought that, instead of going out for dinner that night, as planned, I would make it to have ready whenever Kathleen got home from work. I insisted upon a few changes, of course, and I conducted an experiment that turned out very nicely. There was also a second experiment, but that one flopped, and the results were discarded before they could ruin the salad.

The big change was to add tuna. I bought the smallest chunk that Agata & Valentina had to offer. I researched methods for poaching it online — much easier than going through my cookery books. In a small saucepan, I brought water and wine to the boil, and then I reduced it to a simmer. It took a while to regain the simmer after I’d slipped the tuna into the water, but in ten minutes it was done. I removed the tuna to a bowl, where I flaked it and drizzled it with olive oil.

Then, in the same water, still simmering, I cooked two eggs, for about nine minutes. Would this be a disaster? Would the eggs develop an odd color or, worse, a funny taste? I wouldn’t know until I put the salad together at the last minute. It turned out that they were just fine.

Then, still in the same simmering water, I cooked a handful of haricots, for just a few minutes. As I’d done with the eggs, I transferred the cooked beans to a bowl of ice water.

Meanwhile, I steamed a bag of assorted heirloom potatoes, most of them quite small. When the largest were tender, I quartered the lot and drizzled them with olive oil as well. This is how I always prepare potatoes for salad. So I missed the thyme and bay called for in the recipe. I’m not sure that they would have added much — muuch that was desirable, I mean. Next time I make this dish, I will buy six or eight small potatoes; I could make a real potato salad with what didn’t go into this one.

By now, all the elements of the salad, except for the dressing, were ready. Dinner was hours away. Heaven!

I had thought from the start that I would compose the dressing by poaching garlic in olive oil. I looked into this online as well, but I’m pretty sure that I came up with a bad recipe. It began with dropping the garlic cloves into boiling water for a few seconds in order to make them easier to peel — an extraordinarily unnecessary step in my book. The poaching time seemed unusually long, especially as the cloves turned an unappealing dirt color. Another bright idea of my own — tossing in a few oil-cured anchovy fillets — made things a little worse. This concoction did not pass the sniff test. I salvaged the anchovies, tossing them into the tuna, and threw the rest away. 

The dressing that I did use was made, more conventionally, by combining safflower oil, the juice of a lemon, mustard, parsley, a dozen-odd capers, and cloves of elephant garlic in a small processor and whizzing them into creaminess. The safflower oil was a most welcome relief after the pong of the boiling olive oil, which had stunk up the flat. I suppose I ought to mention salt and pepper. They were added in small amounts as I went along. To the wine and water, for example. Salt and pepper are very important ingredients, salt especially. But they’re also incredibly personal, and part of being a good cook is knowing how much of them will suit you and the people whom you’re feeding. Don’t pay attention to what anyone else says — except of course when baking. (Baking is chemistry; its recipes are formulas.)

When Kathleen called to say that she was heading home, I began to combine things. The remaining capers went into the tuna bowl, and so did the chives. I halved two dozen pitted niçoise olives and threw them in as well, despite the recipe’s instructions to serve them on the side. Thinking that I had far too many potatoes, I reached in for small handfuls, three in all — about a third of what I’d steamed: this is a salad with potatoes, not a potato salad. (Good to know!) I peeled and quartered the eggs; in future, I think that I shall do what I usually do, which is to crumble the yolks and dice the whites. (Maybe I’ll toss in a third egg, cooked and quartered, just for looks.) The beans went in at the last minute, right before the dressing. Because Kathleen doesn’t care for basil, I omitted it, and didn’t miss it myself. I sprinkled bits and pieces of mesclun greenery onto our plates and then spooned the salad atop it, garnishing with the egg quarters.

We were surprised at how light the salad was; we’d both expected it to be somewhat heavy. What with tuna, potatoes, olives, anchovies, capers, and garlic… But those last three ingredients were brighteners, not darkeners. (The whizzed capers, together with the lemon juice, would have given the salad a positively neon finish without the tuna and the potatoes to anchor them.) It was so much more delicious than we thought it would be that we laughed out loud.

I’ve been deliberately shambolic about presenting my amendments to Mr Tanis’s recipe, because I think it wise to oblige you, if you’re thinking of giving this dish a try, to write it all out ahead of time for yourself. (I’d be most grateful if you’d send me a copy.)

***

On Saturday night, we had dinner at Nice-Matin with a friend from out of town — from out of town now; he and his wife are contemplating a move to Gotham — and we were seated in a tight spot at a table along the wall opposite the windows giving out onto Amsterdam Avenue. (If there is anything “Amsterdam” about Amsterdam Avenue, I have yet to suspect it.) Kathleen and our guest were seated on banquettes, and I had the chair with my back to the room. My back, also, alas, to a table close behind us. At some point before our entrées were served (the place was hopping), I was tapped on the shoulder, and a man’s voice called out, “Hey, big guy, you’re rocking us to sleep here.” My surprise lasted only an instant, but the mortification deepened until I thought that I was going to be unable to breathe. I pulled my chair in and felt my face flush with heat. It was not a pleasant feeling; it contained a lot of anger. Vanity presented a number of alternative ways in which my unwelcome intrusion might have been stopped earlier; it was fairly obvious that I didn’t know that the back of my chair was bouncing against another table. Or perhaps it wasn’t. I’d been the “big guy” in a “tight spot,” something I go to great lengths to avoid but hadn’t, there and then, had the chance to do anything about. Now I had to do something, so I leaned over and whispered to Kathleen that I thought I might have to leave the restaurant, I was so upset. That seemed to do the trick; I felt a little better just for having said it. I felt a lot better when the clown and his girlfriend paid their bill and departed. I was second to none in acknowledging their right to the quiet enjoyment of their dinner. But I’m pretty sure that a sign to Kathleen or our guest, or a word to the waitress, would have managed a less abrasive fix.

At Fairway this afternoon, the presence of a six-pack of Tsing Tao in my groceries occasioned a request for ID. I told the checkout girl that I would rather not buy the beer than prove that I was old enough to buy it; that, in fact, I was insulted by the request. I recalled an earlier round of this nonsense at the Food Emporium, which the bedeviled manager dealt with by instructing the checkout clerks to type in his own birthday. At Fairway, the request was dropped immediately, and I was allowed to buy the beer without showing my driver’s license. All the way home, all I could think of was how deeply gratifying it would be to take a baseball bat to the head of whatever omedhaun dreamed up this totally Stalinist derogation of discretion: no matter how bloody, the battery would entail no loss of brainpower. I think that I was still angry with the good people of Nice-Matin, for pretty thoughtlessly seating me in an impossible situation. I won’t let it happen a second time.

***

I’m in the middle of Colm Tóibín’s second novel, The Heather Blazing, and I’m hooked. It was a hard novel to get into, for a reason wholly extrinsic to the book itself. In alternating chapters, we shift between present and past, between Dublin and the seacoast just north of Wexford — the same terrain, and much of the same autobiographical material, that appears in The Blackwater Lightship, Tóibín’s first “big” book. It’s not the second novel’s fault that I’d read the fourth before, but it did take a while for me to get beyond a sense of theme-and-variations, interesting enough but hardly gripping. Now, though, I’m as taken up by the story of Eamon Redmond as if I’d never read another word of Tóibín. (And the novel that I’m now reminded of is Brooklyn.) The novel addresses a part of me that is usually offline: having grown up Catholic. Having, for example, fasted before Communion, and worried over sins in the confessional. (I was once told by Monsignor Scott that he was thinking of personally seeing to it that I was thrown out of Iona. So much for anonymity.) I remember a certain willingness to get down on my knees and pray aloud, “Turn, then, most gracious advocate, thine eyes of mercy toward us” — the words running together in a sweet ragù of piety. “After this our exile show unto us” — who spoke like that? Nobody. Veneremur cernui!

What I love about Colm Tóibín as a writer is that while he is frequently quite funny in his criticism, he is never funny in his fiction, even in humorous situations. He may fool with people’s private parts, but he never fools with the English language; it is always as beautiful in his hands as a Benediction.

I’ll get to what that has to do with my distaste for James Joyce some other time.