Well, I’ve got an iPhone. An iPhone 5. I had gone “off contract” with my first smartphone, an HTC, at the beginning of the month, and so was eligible for a special price on what was still a very expensive piece of equipment. I was advised, by an adviser very close to the family, a member of the family actually, to wit: Megan, that Android phones are unreliable. Mine certainly was. It had taken, most recently, to rebooting in the middle of phone calls. (More bothersome to me, I had also been unable to install a Chinese-character flash-card app.) There was an edge to Megan’s recommendation, an unspoken don’t-come-crying-to-me-if-you-miss-our-calls-from-San-Francisco, that completely overcame my instinctual resistance to All Things Apple. Kathleen, by the way, thinks that I already own All Things Apple, what with my clutch of Nanos, two classic iPods, and the old iPad. But I have never owned or operated an Apple computer.

That was yesterday. I had been putting off my visit to the phone store, which is only up the street, but the transaction was painless and would have gone quite quickly if relaying my contact information from the old phone to the new one had been straightforward, which it couldn’t be, because the old phone was misbehaving. In the evening, I found myself unable to buy the flash-card app on the new iPhone, but I worked round it by purchasing it on the iPad, whereupon it became available for installation on the phone. I spent an hour with the flash-cards and was spooked by my progress. Characters that I really didn’t know at all became familiar in a short time, owing to the stickiness of the drill. First, you have to choose the pinyin rendering of the character from one of four possibilities, and this gets tricky over time as tones come into play. (Shí is “o’clock,” shì is “to be.”) Having passed that hurdle, you hear the character pronounced, and now you have to choose the character’s meaning in English, again from four possibilities. This is tricky, too. Two early characters, néng and huì, for example, both mean (but in different ways) “to be able.” (It has always fascinated me that you cannot say, in English, “to can,” unless you’re talking about vegetables.)

I’m sure that I’ve forgotten most of the stuff that was new to me yesterday, but today’s drill will change that. You know, I’ve had cardboard Chinese-character flash-cards for years. Decades. But — largely because I was never sure about my pronunciation (rightly!) — they weren’t nearly as effective as the app is. (I sound out the character with the app, but I’m not tested on that performance.) The app highlights my mistakes, and confronts me with those characters more frequently.

Today, I am going to the Museum. I’m taking Ms NOLA’s mother, who is in town, to lunch first; then we’ll be joined by Fossil Darling and Ray Soleil. Two things that I want to see are the Gérard portrait of Talleyrand, which I’ve already ogled twice but about which I know a bit more now that the Museum has devoted an issue of its Bulletin to Gérard, and the Julia Margaret Cameron photographs. The Cameron show is the latest entry in a growing list of shows that, under Thomas Campbell’s frugal eye, the Museum has assembled out of its own vast holdings.

***

Ray Soleil, recovering from a broken arm, didn’t sleep well last night and, given the weather, decided to stay home, as did Fossil Darling, who is on that mandatory vacation that bankers have to take (now with email access, but no ability to delete messages and clear out the inbox). So, after lunch, Mme NOLA and I stepped through the shank of a thunderstorm to the Museum, where we saw a great many things by ourselves, including Julia Margaret Cameron’s wonderful still-photograph staging of Lear with his daughters. Cameron’s jolly husband played Lear (managing to look not jolly), while Lear’s daughters were impersonated by the three (three of the?) Liddell sisters, with Alice as Cordelia. Alice was, for the duration of this exposure, Cordelia. She wasn’t the vaguely pre-sexual beggar girl (Dodgson/Carroll) or the rebarbative Pomona (another Cameron), but Shakespeare’s heartsunk Cordelia. It was maddening to discover that neither of the books of Cameron’s photography on offer at a nearby kiosk included this amazing image. Speaking of amazing images, I took a picture of Mme NOLA from behind, as she was gazing at a Monet. And then I took a picture of the title card on the wall. Or I thought I did. Neither of these pictures showed up on my camera just now. (Drat.)

As you’ve no doubt read by now, James Wood gives Necessary Errors, the novel that Caleb Crain waited to be fully grown to write, an extraordinarily favorable review in this week’s New Yorker, confessing at the top that he read the book with competitive envy and had to admit that it was indeed “enviable.” (What that must have cost!) It’s the sort of review that, if you’ve read the book and liked it, encourages you to savor it again, from a more or less slightly different perspective. When I got home from the Museum, I communed with Necessary Errors by listening to the New World Symphony, possibly my least favorite thing by DvoÅ™ak, and to two movements from Smetana’s Ma Vlast, “The Moldau” and “From Bohemia’s Fields and Forests.” It was these latter two pieces that really reminded me of Crain’s novel. I don’t recall his ever referring to the river that flows through Prague by name — an elegant evasion of the difficulty of choosing between the easy-to-say but utterly German “Moldau” and the native “Vltava,” which (kiss of death for novels with foreign settings) looks harder to say than it is. If the river had an English name, such as “Danube,” there would have been no problem.

Anyway, as the river swirled in Smetana’s tone poem — swirling a lot like the Rhine in Das Rheingold, I couldn’t help noticing, wondering why I’d never noticed before (or had I, and just forgot?) — I thought of Jacob Putnam, Crain’s hero, growing, from from someone whose “one reliable pleasure” is reading, into someone with at least two reliable pleasures, and how sweet and innocent that is, the discovery that sex is good. Not everybody makes it. It’s easy to learn that sex is fun, but fun is not necessarily good; the distance between the two grows into an abyss over time, if there is a difference, and (suddenly) fun is the opposite of good — but it’s too late to go back. It’s my own opinion, so to speak, that sex is only all about sex, and nothing else, and I wouldn’t put this thought in anyone else’s head, but I suspect that Jacob reaches the same conclusion. Sex is not about anything else. It only seems to be, before you experience it, and can only think about it terms of other things. If you’re lucky, those other things burn away in the experience of sex, and, if the sex is good (it can be fun, but it has to be good, too), a certain harmony ensues.

I can’t wait to re-read Necessary Errors, but I’ll have to — six months at least, I’d say.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 28th, 2013 at 8:33 pm.