Gotham Diary:
Going Ahead Anyway
Friday, 20 May 2011
After taking yesterday off — off from writing here — I hardly expected to prolong my absence. But what I expected to be a simple delivery turned into a big deal, and I had to summon the help of Ray Soleil. This led, unaccountably, to standing in the rain at four in the afternoon, trying to hail a cab. It doesn’t get much dumber than that! Great things were accomplished on the shopping front, as it turned out — the economy will live, if I have anything to do with it — but I went from sipping late-afternoon tea with Ray to freshening up for an evening movie with Kathleen, and now it’s midnight, or nearly. I am reduced to writing off the top of my head.
The great conundrum of keeping a diary, online or otherwise, is that, the more you have to do that’s interesting, the less time there is for writing it up. So I’ll beg your indulgence while I check off some names. I’ve read William Deresiewicz’s wonderful book about Jane Austen, which really was hardly what I expected to do after writing about his college-blues piece in The Nation. I liked A Jane Austen Education better at the beginning than at the end; my own take on the class issues that Deresiewicz raises, particularly in the part of his memoir that’s attached to the discussion of Mansfield Park, can only be described as quite similar but entirely different. Forced to put the entire difference simply, I think I’d say that I haven’t given up on the salubriousness of reminding indolent and privileged kids about the workout that the guillotine got in 1794.
This afternoon, I glanced at William Pfaff on George Kennan and John Lukacs: it would be hard to add a fourth name to this august trio; almost everybody younger than I am (all those smart men who write for Condé Nast publications, for example) seems, in comparison, clever but facile, and strangely out of it — yet another Idiocracy alert, I suppose.
The movie that we went to see was François Ozon’s Potiche, which I think ought to be renamed La Reine, because that’s exactly what Catherine Deneuve is here, combining in one person Elizabeth II and Helen Mirren. There is in this film the most transcendent sense of acting without impersonation. How many movies has Deneuve made with Gérard Depardieu? He’s heavier than ever, but she lost a few pounds for this film. Still, there’s a sense in which it doesn’t matter what she looks like. It goes without saying, by the way, that Ozon has made the definitive Seventies period movie.
Now I’m going to turn in with Judith Martin on Venice. We were told about this book at a cocktail party last week. We — and I mean Kathleen and I, here — responded with praise for Donna Leon. Once I had No Vulgar Hotel in my hot little hands, I went straight to the index, where I found two entries for my favorite baroque opera impresario. Neither was anywhere near hardly expected. Here’s a snip from the first.
Fans of Donna Leon’s mysteries give themselves away by their abnormal interest in mundane places — a counterintuitive desire to visit police headquarters or a sudden cry of “Look! That’s where Guido buys flowers for Paola.”
It gets better.