Before anything else, I have to share my father-in-law’s answer to yesterday’s question: it turns out that veal tenderloin has been masquerading under the name noisette de veau. I’ve certainly seen that on menus, and I may even have known what it was, once upon a time — a time when I was ignorant of meat cuts generally, and “tenderloin” was just a word. I maintain that I’ve never seen it for sale in a shop, under any kind of name. But I’m relieved to know that those tenderloins haven’t been going to waste. “Were they real?”, Kathleen’s father sighed when she told him what we’ had for dinner the night before. Oh, yes; they were real. 

Five or six years ago, at a gathering of bloggers (imagine such a thing now), I heard a number of people complain that they were having a hard time coming up with interesting things to write about. “It’s terrible! All I can ever think of is ‘What I had for dinner last night’!” I’ve written a handful or two of entries about that very subject, but I’ve tried to keep a lid on it — actually, keeping a lid on it hasn’t been that hard, because I’m rarely very interested, the next day, by what I had for dinner the night before, and certainly least of all when I can’t think of anything else to write about. When you have nothing to say, resorting desperately to ‘tried and true’ fallbacks is rarely a good idea, because if you’re not inspired by what’s new and different in your life — that is, if you can’t even see what’s new and different in it — you’re probably not in the best frame of mind for dusting off some old kitchen clichés. The problem with blogging remains, however, that of writing regularly, preferably daily. Even if nobody reads what you write, the habit of turning out a few readable paragraphs every day is one of the best that any writer can have — certainly the best habit that does not involve the judicious reading of other people’s writing. 

I’ve been reading Alan Jacobs’s engaging little book, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction. I have found it provocative in ways that I doubt the author intended. Quite often, I’m piqued by something that Jacobs has taken for granted — without, I believe, sensing that he was taking anything for granted. In the section entitled “Lost,” he recounts the story of William Cobbett’s intellectual awakening as a teenager. His eye was caught by Swift’s The Tale of a Tub in a suburban bookshop window, and he decided to spend his lunch money to buy it. He was so absorbed by the satire that he forgot his hunger and read until it was simply too dark to make out the words. “The lure of the book so compelled him,” Jacobs writes, 

that he voluntarily gave up a meal in exchange for the chance to read it; and the spell of the book, as he read it, was so strong that neighter hunger nor darkness could touch him. He was “rapt”; anyone passing him would have recognized that “eye-on-the-object look.” 

I have never known this rapture, ever. It is not within the gift of my nervous system to grant forgetfulness of bodily discomforts. I can postpone easing them, and when I do, invariably when I’m reading something exciting, narrative suspense is amplified by a measure of suspense concerning my ability to withstand privation. I don’t lose myself for hours; I am up and about every twenty minutes or so just dealing with the noise that comes from within my skin. I long ago learned how to minimise the disruption caused these distractions, and to suppress ones coming wholly from outside. I keep my house in order, to put very succinctly. The result is that I’m bemused by the trouble that people have with the distraction of the Internet. I don’t know whether to envy or pity the spellbinding enchantments of their pre-digital lives. 

But there’s more to it than refilling the tea mug and running to the bathroom. When I say that I never forget myself, I mean never. When I was young, this relentless self-awareness was crushing, and I look a lot of recreational drugs just to get away from myself (a desire that had nothing to do, I insist, with hating myself). Even LSD didn’t do the trick, though. Now that I’m at the other end of life, being aware of what I’m thinking all the time, of how I’m responding, say, to what I’m reading while I’m reading it, is no longer so crippling; it’s just the way I’m wired, and I’ve learned to live with it. And, as always when you learn to live with something, I’ve found distinct advantages in the persistence of my own company, as it were. It has taught me, for one thing, that pleasure is not a commodity, something that you go out and consume, but a harmony, a congruence between an experience and your state of being. (If you’re not in the mood, in other words, even Jane Austen isn’t going to cut it.) While I don’t believe that our pleasures are so personal, so idiosyncratic — so subjective — that we have nothing intelligible to say about them, I do think that it helps to know something about the context of a critical response. When it comes to writing about a given performance of music — to pick the sharpest case — I think that talking about my recollections of other performances is more illuminating than the attempt to pin analytical absolutes and mood markers on the event, and vastly more useful than an abstract dissection of the piece of music itself. Beethoven’s Eroica exists on paper, and much can be learned from examining the celestial mathematics of its score. But none of us has ever heard that symphony, nor will we ever. We have only heard discrete executions, fallen and imperfect from the point of view of strict realization, but occasionally unbeatably satisfying for all that. 

Thinking hard about all of this for several months, I’ve become uncomfortable with the patina of objectivity that I know very well how to spread over my commentary. During the golden age of print journalism, professional reporters made a religious tenet of burying personal responses, on the theory that no reader cared what a reporter thought, because who the hell was a reporter? Just a guy with a pencil. We think differently nowadays, but there remain occasions for sticking to the illusion of “the facts, ma’am — just the facts.” I’ve developed a trope for such occasions: I stick a virtual mascot on my shoulder and write in the first person plural. (The first person plural is wonderfully effective at wrongfooting any attempts to squeeze in the individual.) At my much-neglected Web site, Civil Pleasures, I intend someday to plant the reasonably expository pieces that can still be found a Portico, a site that I have abandoned. It will be very helpful, when I write those pages, to be able to refresh my memory with notes and recollection culled from more casual writing here. But in order to write here as often as I do, I have to keep it casual.

Instead of writing about Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris itself, then, I’m going to tell you how I got from the movie house to lunch. Oh, I loved the movie. I adored it! But that’s about me, not Midnight in Paris. As I stepped onto the pavement, I felt something odd right away. Instead of the usual post-glamorous-comedy letdown, in which I wish that my life were different, I came out feeling very happy about my life as it is. After all, the life that I’m living is such that I had only to walk across the street first thing in the morning to see a very funny movie chock-full of arty references that I grasped easily enough to appreciate the filmmaker’s skill at saving them from mere gratuity — and also a movie that functions even more incisively than any of its predecessors as an object lesson in Woody Allen’s profoundly cinematic sensibility, even as it casts ghostly highlights on earlier pictures (I was especially reminded of Shadows and Fog, but also of the portrait of a bad marriage — here a bad-marriage-to-be — in Crimes and Misdemeanors). I was alive to Allen’s extraordinarily adroit handling of his actors’ gifts; if there were absolutely nothing else to recommend Midnight in Paris, it would deserve immortality simply for the comic haberdashery of matching one of the funniest movie jokes ever with the particular funny-man talents of Gad Elmaleh. I was amazed that two of my favorite actresses on earth, Rachel McAdams and Marion Cotillard, had been dangled before me in a way that left me delighted, not discontented. It may look as though I’m talking about a movie here, but I’m not.

Then I turned the corner of 86th and Second, heading down to the Hi-Life for a club sandwich, and a new song came on the Nano. I knew what it was right away, because even though I had never heard this original version in my life I was very familiar with its Sesame Street knockoff, also featuring the singer-songwriter Feist: “1234.” How cool to learn this neat song from my grandson’s enthusiasm! How cool of Sesame Street, too, of course — but the fact is that I’m living in a world where these very nice things are happening. They start happening out in the world around me, but they end up happening in my head. Midnight in Paris pushed me beyond counting my blessings; it made me feel blessed.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Friday, May 27th, 2011 at 6:00 pm.