Gotham Diary:
Floundering
4 April 2013
Floundering has characterized the morning. Am I well enough? Too sick? Am I sick? And, if so, with what? On Monday, I’ll have my annual physical checkup, and it can’t come soon enough for Kathleen, who has been urging me to call the doctor all week. She worries that it’s my heart. I’ve had a few moments of worrying the same, but I think that I’ve been right to regard this as an idiosyncratic ailment that will never really be explained. Well, we shall see on Monday. The short-windedness has abated, but the stitch in my side still makes itself known from time to time.
Twenty minutes ago, I stretched out on the bed with a book, and presently felt too tired to read it. But I could tell that I was not drifting toward sleep. What I needed was simply to lie down for ten minutes. So it seems — a ten-minute lie-down has never done me the slightest good or harm. It appears that I can lie down for ten minutes without being painfully bored. If nothing else signals a profound change in life, that certainly does. In any case, I soon jumped out bed, filled my tea mug, and started going through recent photographs, desperate for something usable. On my walk yesterday — I went out to lunch, got a haircut, and stopped at Fairway for soup and salad, which even Kathleen could prepare for the table if I felt poorly (in the event, I didn’t) — the walking itself was such a chore that I never thought to stop and take a photograph, even though I’d changed the camera’s battery before going out.
One of the things that I am floundering about at the moment is whether to go to Crawford Doyle in search of books that will hold my attention without my making much effort. There’s a new book about Nancy Astor that’s sort of up my alley, and that I’d have bought already if I weren’t afraid that my vague but longstanding dislike of the woman (I, too, would drink that coffee) might blossom into irritated hostility upon closer acquaintance. (And I’m not sure that the book is any good, either.) Were I to visit the bookshop, it would be by taxi, round trip. Far more likely is a trip across the street to Gristede’s (on which I can take more photographs for my Callot-inspired collection, Les Misères de la Subway Station Construction). I’d already have run that errand, if it were only warmer. The Times predicts a high of 56º, and so does my smartphone; but said phone tells me that it’s 34º out there now. Weather.com puts it at 43º (“feels like 40º”). I’m not going to Gristede’s until I can go in shorts.
When The New Yorker didn’t show up in yesterday’s mail, I thought about running across the street to the newsstand, just to be sure to have a copy. But the magazine had already arrived, just when it ought to have done; I felt too lousy on Monday afternoon to go through the mail. I’m especially glad that I didn’t buy a second copy, because it has been a long time since I was so turned off by an issue of this great magazine. It seems, surreptitiously, to be “The Men’s Issue.” There are two media stories of very dubious importance, one about Henry Blodget and one about Vice. Vice! Even Paul Rudnick’s piece (about a mommyblogger) seems more verisimilitudinously misogynistic than hilarious. (I shall, however, endeavor to add “Sonnet, Cascade, Nebula and Diaspora” to the my treasury of bits and bobs. Those are the names of the mommyblogger’s wonderful children, one of whom has entitled a picture of incinerated stick figures, “While They’re Asleep.”) Hendrik Hertzberg and James Surowiecki don’t have anything uncharacteristic to say, but in my current delicate condition they seemed both hectoring and blinkered. I am finding it harder and harder to read business writers who don’t recognized that we should make the Dunbar Number the key of our corporate tax code: organizations employing fewer than 150 people ought to be taxed far more lightly than those with bigger payrolls. It is time for economists to accept the fact that growth, in business as in life, inevitably leads to death. And any enterprise that truly requires armies of employees ought to be run — by the army. (Let’s learn from the Chinese!)
After my errands yesterday, I sat down and read what remained of Robyn Annear’s The Man Who Lost Himself, the book about the Tichborne Case. It was probably not the best thing to read while under the weather. All that Australian bush, for one thing. Just as unappealing as the scenery in a “Western.” (And only a few of the many locations mentioned in the text appear in my world atlas, depriving me of the one minor satisfaction that might have been extracted.) Then there is the sordor. The whole impostery of Arthur Orton depended on relatively primitive photography, rhetoric, and a rather widespread discontent among the English élite with the Victorian status quo. (Had Trollope written it up, he would have pitted gentlemen — anti-Claimant — against betting men.) The words of Judge Mellor, a member of the bench in R v Castro, sum the whole thing up so perfectly that there really seems no need for a book.
Indeed, it is difficult to conceive how any person who has considered the intrinsic improbabilities of your story, and has intelligently considered the evidence which has been adduced in the course of this trial, could have come to any other conclusion.
The wonder isn’t that the Claimant lost, but rather that he ever got into court in the first place. For this, his sporting supporters must bear responsibility for wasting torrents of money and creating feeding frenzies in the popular prints.
While writing here this week, I have been listening to the latest playlist, which is built on music by William Walton. There are plenty of chestnuts in the mix, and also a work that I have never really known at all, Handel’s Alexander’s Feast. I am going to slip into this playlist the three Arvo Pärt pieces (out of four) that Paul Taylor set to danse in The Uncommitted, and that I’ve been able to get my hands on. (Fratres, Mozart Adagio, Summa) Not next to the Handel, you can be sure.