Dear Diary: After Another
A few mildly interesting things happened today, but either I’m obliged not to write about them or they’re about food. I improvised another dish for dinner, but had the devil of a time over lunch.
I finished Tony Judt’s Postwar, at last — and then I wondered what the dickens I’ll write about it, if anything. Oh, it’s a grand book, and essential reading for everyone with a brain. But/and it seems quite enough just to say that.
I was daunted by the number of pages that I have to write. I did write one, and when a friend asked me how I’d liked Easy Virtue, I rumbled it into presentability and published it without editing. If you know your way around Portico (and care), you’ll find it easily enough. I could have just answered the question by saying that I liked the film very much, and not least because of its defects — which perhaps will turn out not to be defects in the long run, when I’ve seen the film, as I undoubtedly shall see it, for the twenty-fifth time.
It bothered me that I did not write about Blithe Spirit or God of Carnage. For what it’s worth, I could not find my copy of Blithe Spirit, and I ordered a copy of Dieu du carnage from Amazon in France. Correction: I placed a copy in my shopping basket. If I do buy it, I know that, by the time it arrives, I won’t care anymore; I’ll have moved on to other curiosities. Writing about the film adaptation of Easy Virtue was made vastly more comfortable by the discovery of a synopsis of the Coward original at Wikipedia. God bless Wikipedia; in any case, I do, with a $10 monthly contribution, made automatically. I have only two principles about the online encyclopedia. The first, obviously, is that I must support it financially (if modestly). The second is that I must never, ever, participate in the writing of a page there. I’m troubled by a recurring dream that always ends with my realizing that the text that I’m straining to read is being written by me — but no longer faster than I can read it. I cannot describe the acrid smell of shorted circuits that accompanies my waking from this nightmare, so I’m going to take care never to risk encountering them at Wikipedia.
I execrated Melville, but there’s no need to repeat that.